The history of the people is captivating from the beginning: Findings from all over the world prove the skill and mobility of their creators. The exhibition also explores how climate, wars or beliefs have influenced cultural development. The skills that distinguished our ancestors can be experienced during an expedition from the Stone Age to the late Middle Ages.

The exhibition draws a line from the beginnings of humanity to the non-European cultures of modern times. The focus is on the archeology and ethnology collections, supplemented by natural history exhibits in the area of ​​evolution and those from the State Gallery in the area of ​​the transition from the Old to the New World. On their tour through the "Human Worlds", visitors first travel through the history of human development and are introduced to their "ancestral line": from the pre-humans, who can already walk upright, to the craftsmen who made the first stone tools, to early man, who hardly differs anatomically from modern man, learns to control fire and leaves Africa as the cradle of humanity. Valuable historical dioramas show our ancestors in their respective habitats.

What follows is the prehistory of humans in what is now Lower Saxony, which is made accessible through a variety of objects: how people immigrated from distant areas, how dramatic climate fluctuations changed the face of the earth, how technical innovations influenced the economy, society and culture and what effects this had on the environment , how a warrior caste emerged, wealth was accumulated and power was exercised and how a society similar to a high culture emerged 3.000 years ago. With the direct, even military, contact between Romans and Germanic peoples in what is now Lower Saxony, many things changed: Germanic warriors took on tasks in the Roman army and returned home with foreign goods and new ideas. Cultural contact allowed trade to flourish and advanced crafts and agriculture. An elite emerged whose status consciousness is reflected, for example, in the rich grave goods of the Roman Empire. Moor finds of textiles show us everyday clothing, but also enable reconstructions of the otherwise almost intangible splendor of elaborately manufactured clothing. Using bog mummies like the “Red Franz” we can also understand the hair and beard fashion in Germania during the Roman Empire.

With the discovery of the New World in the 15th century, people's everyday lives changed. This also changes the perspective of the visitors: from Lower Saxony to the cultures of the world. Particularly valuable exhibits from the South Seas come from Captain James Cook's second voyage around the world between 1772 and 1775. They are among the oldest examples of material culture from the South Seas in the world and are considered examples of a "still unchanged culture" before contact with Europeans .

In the exhibition, multiperspective approaches repeatedly break through the one-sided, Europe-centered reading of objects. At the end of the tour, so-called "colonic figures" symbolize the colonized's view of the colonizers. At the beginning of the exhibition stands the evolution of man, which took place especially in Africa; at the end, it comes back to Africa again, but this time as a culturally highly exciting place of the present. Thus, relations can be established here between millions of years, between natural history, archeology and ethnology.