The Museum of human paleontology "Terra Amata" – part of the archaeological Museum of nice, and some extremely exciting. Here you can see how they lived on the shores of the Mediterranean prehistoric people who already knew the fire, who knew how to make stone tools and hunted elephants and bison.

In 1958, in nice, in the former residence of the king of Yugoslavia, is planned construction of a luxury building "Carnot Palace. During the excavation they found stone tools, and excavations began a team of archaeologists headed by Henri de Lumley. The results were so significant that the city authorities decided to create a Museum. In 1976 he opened built on the ground floor there is a residential building. Beneath the Museum is dedicated to the great hall, the center of which was a huge fragment of prehistoric pebble beach, called by scientists Terra Amata (which translates as "beloved land").

Four hundred thousand years ago the coast of present Mediterranean looked completely different: the sea level was higher at the location of the Museum, in a secluded Bay, was the beach. Here in the lungs huts the people lived. The slopes descending to the sea the mountains were covered with dense forest, inhabited by animals – elephants, bison, fallow deer, deer, wild boars, and woolly rhinos, rabbits. To hunt them, the people of Terra Amata established manufacturing cut stone and bits of pebble beach.

In the Museum you can see a reconstruction of the huts of the people of the Neolithic – built of stakes and branches with a hole in the roof for smoke. This hut could have up to 15 metres in length. In the center there was a hearth, paved with pebbles.

The exhibition presents a block of petrified ash from the hearth. Finely executed layouts demonstrate the life of ancient settlements. At the stands of many ancient tools from the point of view of modern man is not too different from ordinary stones, but the chips on them are made, without doubt, prehistoric hand of the master. The tools are clearly not lying idle: the Museum displays the fossilized horn of a deer, half jaw of an elephant. This production of ancient hunters.

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

But in the Museum there is a unique exhibit, about which no dispute. This is the only surviving trace of a man – the ancient hunter slipped, the movement of his right foot imprinted in the soil. Along the length of the track calculated the height – 155 cm. Small by today's concepts, that of a tall man was sitting by the fire on the beach, hewed stone Rubicom branch, listening to the waves, looked at the stars.