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An Italian museum to the south of Rome is about to open a new exhibit.

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As Ben Wedeman shows us, its sheds some light on what life was like 600,000 years ago.

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Slowly, painstakingly paleontologist Anna Rosa removes the wrapping from an old tusk and brushes off the dust.

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"It's a fragment of elephantos antiquus," she says.

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And exactly how antiquus is it?

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"It's from about 600,000 years ago," she responds.

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Back then, Italy was a different place --

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hot and dry most of the year, home to not just elephants, but also rhinos, water buffalo, hippos and hyenas.

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And it was also the stomping grounds for Homo erectus,

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who came before the Neanderthals and well before us, Homo sapiens.

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We were given a sneak preview of the soon-to-be-open new wing of the National Museum of Paleontology in Isernia, southeast of Rome.

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The workers were rushing to put the finishing touches on the displays.

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It's in this area that some of the earliest traces of man in Europe have been found.

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Professor Antonella Minelli let me stick my grubby hands inside the display cases

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to get a feel for what 700,000 years ago were the height of high tech --

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purpose-designed rocks for killing prey, smashing their bones and stripping their skin.

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Where I see a sharp rock, professor Minelli sees the brilliance of early man.

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"It is par excellence the tool that man was able to produce," she tells me.

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"It shows their great cognitive, mental and technical abilities."

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What attracted man and the other animals here was an ancient river bank discovered in 1978, when a road was being built.

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It's littered with prehistoric bones.

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"And on the banks of this river," says the professor, "man preyed on the animals, perhaps dragging the biggest pieces over here and eating them on the spot."

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It was no doubt very messy, the stench of rotting flesh overwhelming,

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but it allowed our great-great-great-great and so on grandparents to survive.

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This is the prehistoric equivalent of our supermarkets. There was lots of food to be had,

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but our ancient ancestors, known in this case as Homo erectus, had to be very quick about it,

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because the problem was there were other animals looking for food.

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And there was always the chance that Homo erectus could be the main course.

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Life was short and brutal, ruled, as paleontologists put it, by hunger and who could strike the hardest blow.

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Maybe we have come a long way after all.