Ever since hominins first appeared on Earth long ago, how have they evolved and survived? This book introduces readers to the fascinating field of biological anthropology, exploring human evolution through both neuroscience and archaeology. The previous series, Human Investigation Report, followed Aure's exploration team as they lived among humans and observed them, revealing why humans think, perceive, and behave the way we do today. Through that story, readers got a taste of the essence of brain science. This newly planned series, Human Exploration Report, introduces 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 of thousands, tens of thousands, and even millions of years ago, and how they evolved to survive on Earth, using both neuroscience and archaeology. We want to introduce children to the discipline that uses biological principles to imagine humanity's past. The name of this field may sound difficult, complicated, and intimidating, but through it we've found fascinating answers to how humans lived tens of thousands of years ago. If Human Investigation Report was 'a brain science project for kids,' then Human Exploration Report is a project that introduces children, for the first time, to 'the neuroscience of Homo sapiens.' History truly is a remarkably scientific subject — we hope even children who love history will enjoy this series! While Human Investigation Report was a book that children who love brain science and science in general could dive into and enjoy, Human Exploration Report adds history to the mix, making it a book that children who enjoy history can also love. History is often thought of as a humanities subject, far removed from science, but it is actually one of the most scientific fields of study. To understand how our ancestors lived, we must imagine and reconstruct their lives from small historical records and clues — and for that reconstruction to be convincing, a scientific approach is essential. That's why biological anthropology can be considered the very essence of science more than any other field. We created this series hoping that children could get a taste of that scientific essence. The human ancestors described and depicted in this book are not absolute truths. Just as scientists infer 'this is how humans must have lived' from small clues like remaining bone fragments, skull shapes, and the ruins and artifacts left behind, this book is structured much like a modern forensic team tracking down a suspect using only clues from a crime scene. In that sense, we hope all of you can become anthropology detectives, using your imagination to picture our ancestors from the past. To understand how humanity built today's vast civilizations, and what makes us different from other great apes, we need to approach the subject through biological anthropology. Why should children learn about biological anthropology — a field that sounds difficult even by name, let alone brain science? When we study what scientists have recently discovered about the differences between humans and other great apes, we find some astonishing things about ourselves. Very young great apes — orangutans, chimpanzees, gorillas — aren't so different from two- or three-year-old human children. Scientists have found that they are remarkably intelligent and capable of many of the same cognitive behaviors we are. So how is it that we've built such an enormous intellectual civilization and live amid the complexities of modern society, while they remain in a primitive state? And why did species like Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, and Homo habilis fail to survive and ultimately go extinct? To find clues to these questions, we needed to examine how the brains of early Homo sapiens differed from those of great apes, as well as from other now-extinct hominins. And what we discovered was that brain size wasn't the key factor. Having a bigger skull or greater brain capacity wasn't what mattered most either.