Fig. 12. Reconstruction of one of the 400 kyr-old shelters at Terra Amata, France. 
The cutout shows the scattering of cobbles and bones in the interior, and on the right 
is seen the emplacement of a shallow hearth. 
kyr ago (dating is hazy) to find a significant innovation in stone 
toolmaking techniques. 
This innovation was the “‘prepared-core”’ tool, whereby a stone 
core was carefully shaped until a single blow could detach a flake 
that required little modification to become a finished implement (fig. 
13). The overwhelming advantage of this technique was to provide 
a virtually continuous cutting edge around most of the periphery of 
the implement. Once more, where the prepared-core tool was in- 
vented, and by whom, remains uncertain; but what is undeniable is 
that the best-documented and quite probably the most accomplished 
practitioners of the technique were the Neanderthals, Homo nean- 
derthalensis. It seems likely that both the Neanderthals and our own 
Homo sapiens were ultimately derived from Homo heidelbergensis 
(or some species like it, but lacking the capacious sinus spaces in 
the skull that are such a striking feature of Homo heidelbergensis). 
The Neanderthals were an indigenous European and western Asian 
development from that ancestor, while Homo sapiens arose in Africa 
or nearby (and Homo erectus ploughed its own evolutionary furrow 
in Asia). 
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