While the main image depicts Anthropology studying and balancing two skulls, one modern and the other decidedly older and very different, two, smaller images ancient, primitive man and modern, Greco-Roman man gaze at one another across time. They are recognizably similar, but also distinctly different. When the Academy dome was designed, great debates over evolution among experts as well as the general public centered on the lineage that connected apes, early hominids, and so-called civilized man. Throughout the dome, the basic design motif for the figures representing modern sciences is Greco-Roman. Here, primitive man is the lone figure depicted otherwise.