‘The exhibition – organised by Giuseppe Minelli, Director of the Institute of Comparative Anatomy at the University of Bologna and, on the anthropology side, by Fiorenzo Facchini, Director of the Institute of Anthropology Of the University of Bologna and Gianni Guisberti – is made up of around 70 panels which reproduce the evolution process, from the birth of Homo Sapiens Sapiens; it is enriched with prehistoric objects, made available by the Insitute of Anthropology of the University of Bologna. Evolution often implies the extinction of some species and the development of new ones, more able to live in modified environmental, climatic and geological situations. A species never takes over from another one gradually, but, so to say, by big leaps. An extinct species is substituted by a new species. Death by specialisation (‘specialised’ animals, that is to say, able to live only in a particular environment and climate, die if there are changes in the environment or climate) is the cost of evolution. Man was the first being able to survive this death by specialisation; although a defenceless biped from the dry African savannah, and easy prey for ferocious felines, man did not only survive but spread from Africa all around the world. Homo Habilis (from over 2 million years ago), Homo Erectus (from 1.6 million to a few hundred thousand years ago), Homo Sapiens and Sapiens Sapiens, are probably not different species: they all belong to the same species which, from the beginning, had those features of industriousness, astuteness, artistic sense, religiosity and sociability, which are charachteristic of man. However big the evolution between Homo Habilis and Homo Sapiens Sapiens was, it did not cause any biological jumps: it was the same species that modified itself by integrating, for the first time in the long history of life, biological evolution with the development of culture, the exclusive protagonist of man’s history.’