Description Professor Jung Jae-seung's Vision for This Series This series introduces readers to the field of biological anthropology, exploring—through both brain science and archaeology—how hominins have evolved and survived since first appearing on Earth long ago. The previous series, The Human Exploration Report, followed the Aure expedition team as they lived alongside humans and observed them, showing why humans think, perceive, and behave the way they do. Through this, readers got a taste of the essence of brain science. This newly planned series, The Humankind Exploration Report, aims to introduce readers to the field of 'biological anthropology'—or, more precisely, 'paleo-neuro-bioanthropology.' In other words, rather than focusing only on humans today, this series explores what kind of brains hominins had hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of years ago, and how they evolved and survived on Earth, using both neuroscience and archaeology. It introduces readers to a field of study that uses biological principles to imagine humanity's distant past. The name of this field may sound complicated and intimidating, but through it, we actually uncover fascinating answers about how humans lived tens of thousands of years ago. If The Human Exploration Report was a 'brain science project for children,' then The Humankind Exploration Report is a project that introduces children, for the first time, to the 'neuroscience of Homo sapiens.' History Is a Truly Scientific Subject—May Even History-Loving Kids Enjoy It! While The Human Exploration Report was a book that science- and brain-science-loving children could dive into and enjoy, I'd like to introduce The Humankind Exploration Report as a book that adds history into the mix—one that children who love history can enjoy as well. History may feel like a humanities subject, far removed from science, but in truth, history is an incredibly scientific discipline. To understand how our ancestors lived, we must imagine and reconstruct their lives from small fragments of historical evidence and clues—and for that reconstruction to be convincing, a scientific approach is absolutely essential. In that sense, biological anthropology may be the purest form of science there is. I created this series hoping that readers could experience that essence of science for themselves. The human ancestors depicted and described in this book are not presented as absolute truth. Just as we infer 'this is likely how early humans lived' based on small clues like preserved bone fragments, skull shapes, and the ruins and artifacts they left behind, this book uses a structure similar to how a modern forensic team tracks down a culprit using only the clues left at a crime scene. In that spirit, I hope every reader can become an anthropological detective, imagining and picturing our ancestors from the past. To understand how humankind built today's vast civilizations, and what set us apart from other great apes, we need to approach the subject through biological anthropology. Why should children learn about biological anthropology—a field that sounds intimidating even by name—in addition to brain science? When we study what scientists have recently discovered about the differences between humans and other great apes, we uncover something remarkable about ourselves. Very young great apes—orangutans, chimpanzees, gorillas—show little difference from two- or three-year-old human children. Scientists have found that they are highly intelligent and capable of many of the same cognitive behaviors we are. So how is it that we've built such an enormous, complex civilization, while they remain in a comparatively primitive state? And why did other hominins, like Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, and Homo habilis, fail to survive to the present day, going extinct instead? To find clues to these questions, we need to examine how the brains of early Homo sapiens differed from those of great apes, as well as from other now-extinct hominins. And when we looked closely, it turned out that brain size wasn't the key factor. It wasn't about having a bigger skull or a larger brain vol—