  A key result in four dimensional black hole physics, since the early 1970s,
is Hawking's topology theorem asserting that the cross-sections of an "apparent
horizon", separating the black hole region from the rest of the spacetime, are
topologically two-spheres. Later, during the 1990s, by applying a variant of
Hawking's argument, Gibbons and Woolgar could also show the existence of a
genus dependent lower bound for the entropy of topological black holes with
negative cosmological constant. Recently Hawking's black hole topology theorem,
along with the results of Gibbons and Woolgar, has been generalised to the case
of black holes in higher dimensions. Our aim here is to give a simple
self-contained proof of these generalisations which also makes their range of
applicability transparent.
