Thousands of works from its collection of antiquities and art — some of civilization's earliest objects — remain lost.
The displays will include some of the earliest objects ever made by man, dating up to 3m years ago, to contemporary works covering the birth of the rainbow nation of South Africa.
One of the earliest objects inscribed with the fully developed Maya calendar is the Leiden Plate, a jade plaque, now housed in the National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden, Netherlands, depicting a richly arrayed Maya lord trampling a captive underfoot.
One of the earliest objects in the sculpture show is "Compart" (1966), a four-panel vertical that starts at the top with a fully formed round, breastlike image of neatly wound cord that mysteriously breaks up into part of the same image on each of the three panels beneath.
Astronomers said the first clear observations of such a stream of stars supported theories that the so-called globular clusters of stars, among the earliest objects in the universe, were once denser and even more numerous but have been depleted or destroyed by tidal forces like those of the Milky Way, Earth's galaxy.
Where other arts institutions have had their budgets reduced by 30% or more over the next four years, public funding for museums was cut by just 15%.Among Mr MacGregor's earliest objects is the Swiss Army knife of the Stone Age, a 1.2m-year-old handaxe found in Tanzania in the 1930s.
"They're giving us new information on how the earliest objects in the universe formed," he says.
The exhibition contains some of the earliest objects collected from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people by British colonists and missionaries after 1770.
This means it may be very difficult to find the earliest objects used for making music, let alone establish whether Neanderthals made use of them.
In response, the Generation-X ("Gen-X") Vision Mission has been proposed as a future X-ray observatory which will be capable of detecting the earliest objects.
