Museum of Human Paleontology "Terra Amata" - part of the Archaeological Museum of Nice, and some incredibly fascinating. Here you can see how people lived on the Mediterranean coast prehistoric people already knew the fire, knew how to make stone tools and hunted elephants and bison.

In 1958, in Nice, the former residence of the King of Yugoslavia, planned to build luxury buildings "Carnot Palace." During excavation found stone tools and a team of archaeologists started excavations led by Henry de Lumley. The results were so significant that the city authorities have decided to create a museum on the site. In 1976, he opened on the ground floor of a residential building constructed here. Under the museum allotted a large hall, the center of which was a huge fragment of prehistoric pebble beach called scientists Terra Amata (which translates as "beloved land").

Four thousand years ago the Mediterranean coast this very differently: the sea level was higher at the location of the museum, in a secluded cove, the beach. Here, in light huts inhabited by people. The slopes of the hills descending to the sea was covered with dense forest, which is inhabited by animals - elephants, bison, deer, deer, wild boars, woolly rhinoceroses, rabbits. To hunt them, people Terra Amata set up the production of stone chopping and tips from the pebble beach.

In the museum you can see the reconstruction of the huts of the Neolithic people - built of stakes and branches, with a hole in the roof for smoke. This cabin can be up to 15 meters in length. In the center was a hearth paved with pebbles.

The exhibition shows a block of petrified ashes from the hearth. Finely executed models show the life of ancient settlements. The stands of many ancient instruments, which in terms of modern man is not too different from the ordinary stones - but how they are made, no doubt, hand the prehistoric wizard. Tools explicitly lay idle: The museum fossilized antlers, half elephant jaw. This extraction of ancient hunters.

The most colorful booth tells the story of human evolution as it is traditionally seen many paleoanthropologists: Australopithecus, Homo erectus, Neanderthal, Homo sapiens ... illustrate the process casts of skulls discovered by scientists in different parts of the planet. Experts argue differently interpreting these findings.

But there is a unique exhibit in the museum, about which there is no dispute. It is the only remaining trace of a man - an ancient hunter slipped, the movement of his right foot imprinted in the ground. By track length calculated height - 155 centimeters. Small by today's concepts, growth, sitting by the fire on the beach, hewn stone chopping a branch, listening to the waves, looking at the stars.