Description: History is actually a wonderfully scientific subject. I hope even children who love history will be able to enjoy this series! While Human Exploration Report was a book that children who love brain science could fully immerse themselves in, I'd like to introduce Human Expedition Report as a book that adds history into the mix, so that children who enjoy history can enjoy it too. History is a humanities subject and may feel quite distant from science, but in fact, history is a remarkably scientific discipline. To understand how our human ancestors lived, we have to use small historical records and clues to imagine and reconstruct the past in our minds, and for that reconstruction to be plausible, a scientific approach is absolutely necessary. That's why biological anthropology can be considered the very essence of science, more so than any other discipline. I created this series hoping that you could taste that essence of science for yourselves. The human ancestors who appear and are described in this book are not absolute truth. Just as we infer 'humanity must have lived like this' from small clues like remaining bone fragments, skull shapes, and the ruins and artifacts they left behind, this book uses a structure similar to how a modern forensic science team tracks down a culprit using only clues from a crime scene. In that sense, I hope all of you can become anthropology detectives and picture our ancestors from the past in your minds this way. To understand how humanity came to build today's massive civilization, and what made us different from other great apes, we need to approach it through biological anthropology. Why should children be introduced not only to brain science, but also to a field that sounds difficult just from its name — biological anthropology? When you study what scientists have recently discovered about the differences between humans and other great apes, you find surprising things about humans. Very young great apes — orangutans, chimpanzees, gorillas — aren't all that different from two- or three-year-old humans. Scientists have found that they are highly developed intellectually and engage in many intelligent behaviors much like we do. So how is it that we've built such an enormous intellectual civilization and live enjoying a complex modern society, while they remain in a primitive state? And why did beings like Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, and Homo habilis fail to survive until today, going extinct instead? To find clues to these questions, we had to examine how the brains of past Homo sapiens differed from those of great apes, and also from other now-extinct hominins. And when we looked into it, brain size wasn't the key factor. Having a larger skull or greater brain volume wasn't what mattered either. It turned out that helping each other, learning socially, teaching friends what we know, learning from friends what we don't know, and cooperating together was what was crucial in allowing weak, fragile humans to build this great civilization. What would it feel like to view all of this through the eyes of an alien? What would it feel like to directly observe, through an alien's eyes, how our ancestors gradually developed this ability to build the kind of society we have today? To search for answers to these questions together, let's take a time machine that can transcend time and travel back to Earth's past. Through scenes of aliens and human ancestors being wary of each other and bumping into all sorts of situations together, I hope children will find an opportunity to understand our ancestors — and with that hope, I've come bearing the discipline of biological anthropology and a new story. Publisher's Book Description: The second story with brain scientist Professor Jung Jae-seung — this time, it's biological anthropology! Following Professor Jung Jae-seung's first series, Jung Jae-seung's Human Exploration Report, which introduced brain science at children's eye level, this second story deals with biological anthropology and human evolution. While Human Exploration Report attempted to view our present selves in an unfamiliar light through the lens of brain science and psychology in order to understand who we are today, this time...