No matter how high the head sits, every beginning starts down below.

Dr. Young Il Ha—former Director of Konyang University Medical Center, and a man whose photographs, I must say, flatter him rather more than life does—published, on June 30, 2026, through Koonja Publishing, a book of no fewer than 528 pages titled The Origin of the Human Head.

The book makes the delightful case that the human head did not simply spring into being one day, but that the nose, mouth, jaw and teeth, ears, neck, eyes, skull, and brain each took their present form over hundreds of millions of years of evolution. In short, it is a book that interrogates the question “who, ultimately, are we?”—starting, quite literally, from the head down.

For the crime of having the wrong friend, I found myself, in the dead heat of summer, condemned to all 528 pages. And true to form, the book closes with the obligatory note of gratitude to his wife, Mrs. Jung-Yeon Choi.

The human head, it turns out, took hundreds of millions of years to arrive at its present form—and yet the art of an aging man securing three square meals a day remains, even now, humanity’s greatest unsolved mystery.

But my suffering was not entirely in vain—for at last, I found the book’s one decisive flaw.

As a former professor of neurosurgery, Dr. Ha can hardly be blamed for insisting, again and again, on the supreme importance of the brain—after all, it is the brain that thinks, judges, and decides.

But however brilliant the brain may be, the story changes the moment one asks how the human race actually begins.

From an embryological standpoint, one cannot deny that every great head owes its very starting point to a rather more fundamental apparatus—one that falls, as it happens, squarely under the jurisdiction of urology.

And so I would ask that neurosurgeons, going forward, refrain from too loudly proclaiming the brain’s supremacy, and instead extend a measure of respect and humility toward the urologists who have, from the very beginning, presided over the deep roots of all medicine.

No matter how high the head sits, every beginning starts down below.

What follows is my own summary of the book’s principal arguments.

The Origin of the Human Head takes up the question “who, ultimately, are we?” by beginning with the human head itself, situating humanity not as an exceptional species presiding over all other life, but as one among countless organisms sharing common ancestry within the long arc of evolution on Earth.

The book’s central premise is that the human head was never a structure completed in a single stroke. The nose, mouth, jaw and teeth, ears, neck, eyes, skull, and brain are each bound up with survival, sensation, movement, feeding, balance, environmental adaptation, and social behavior, and each arrived at its present form only through the long accumulation of evolutionary change. Drawing on anatomy, biology, and evolutionary theory, the book treats the human head not merely as a collection of organs but as a history book of life itself.

The book begins, appropriately, with the nose. Chapter One, “To Smell,” addresses the sense of smell among the head’s sensory organs. Its section headings—caves, the dancing nose, goats, the nostrils of the flounder, genes—reveal that smell is no mere sensory function but an ancient survival mechanism deeply bound to foraging, danger avoidance, mate selection, and environmental awareness. The discussion of the flounder’s nostrils and its genetics, in particular, illustrates how the shape and function of the nose evolved differently across species, and that the human nose, too, bears the traces of life’s long adaptation to its environment.

Chapter Two, “To Taste,” turns to the mouth—an organ that, long before it ever spoke a word or formed an expression, served as the passage by which living things took in matter from the world outside. Section titles such as “It Begins with the Mouth,” “The Mouth Is an Anus,” “The Tongue Is a Muscle That Cuts the Body,” “Taste from a Flower Bud,” and “A History of Taste” explain how the mouth functions both as the gateway to the digestive system and as a sensory organ, and how the bodies of living things evolved to distinguish inside from outside in the pursuit of energy. Taste, the book argues, is not mere pleasure but the outcome of a survival judgment separating the edible from the dangerous—and the human tongue and palate, it notes, are products of biological selection long before they became a matter of cultural preference.

Chapter Three, “To Bite and Chew,” traces the origins of the jaw and teeth. The emergence of the jaw meant the development of the ability to seize, cut, and chew prey—an event that fundamentally altered the survival strategies of animals. Teeth, too, are more than mere hard structures; they are clues that reveal an organism’s diet, way of life, and evolutionary lineage. Judging from section titles such as “The Ancestor of Teeth,” “Teeth of Every Kind,” “Teeth in Transformation,” and “A Face Turned Vertical,” this chapter explains how changes in teeth and jaw relate to the shape of the face, to feeding strategies, and, ultimately, to the formation of a distinctly human countenance.

Chapter Four, “To Hear,” examines the origins of hearing and balance, centered on the ear. Its section titles—“Balance Comes First,” “A Cell Grows Hair,” “The Lever Inside the Ear,” “A World That Spins”—reveal that the ear did not begin as a mere organ for hearing sound, but was closely bound up from the start with the apparatus of balance, which tracks the body’s position and movement. Because the sensory organs of the head take in the outer world even as they regulate the body’s own posture and orientation, the book explains, the evolution of the ear developed into the capacity of a living being to maintain itself within a moving world.

Chapter Five, “To Turn the Neck,” addresses the neck—a structure that both connects and separates the head from the trunk. That the head can move with a degree of independence from the trunk means that its sensory organs can be turned in any direction desired, allowing for a far wider exploration of the surrounding world. Section titles such as “The Head and Trunk Part Ways,” “What the Gills Left Behind,” “Fish and the Aorta,” “The Thyroid,” and “The Giraffe and the Snake” trace the evolutionary vestiges that remain in the human neck—that is, the anatomical transformations that carry a fishlike structure forward into land vertebrates, and ultimately into humankind.

Chapter Six, “To See the World,” turns to the evolution of the eye—the process by which the capacity to sense light developed into a complex visual organ, alongside discussions of the proteins that compose the eye, the so-called third eye, the eyes of fish, and a section titled “The Eye Sees, the Brain Knows.” The chapter’s central claim is that seeing is never the work of the eye alone. The eye receives light, but it is the brain that constructs meaning from it—so the evolution of vision is, at once, the story of a sensory organ’s development and of the nervous system and brain. When a human being says they ‘see’ the world, the book argues, this is no mere optical event, but an act of interpretation that body and brain construct together.

Chapter Seven, “The Lid Appears,” tells the story of the skull. The skull is at once a structure protecting the brain and sensory organs and a complex system of bone connecting the jaw, face, and neck. Section titles such as “A World Without Heads,” “The Intricate Skull,” “Bone Born from Skin,” and “A Skull with a Family Tree Written Upon It” reveal that the skull is no mere protective shell, but a record bearing the lineage and evolutionary history of living things. The human skull, the book notes, is at once a vessel for the brain and an integrated structure combining sensory organs, the chewing apparatus, and the mechanisms of respiration and vocalization.

Chapter Eight, “The Sovereign Appears,” brings the book’s argument to its culmination, centered on the brain. Its sections—“A Thinking Lump of Meat,” “Animals Begin,” “The Jellyfish Revolution,” “Photographs of Animal Brains,” “It’s All About the Spike,” “Sculpting the Human,” “Why Humans Are Peculiar,” “A Department in Charge,” “The Gavel Falls”—proceed in turn through the signaling of neurons, the emergence of the animal nervous system, the functions of the brain’s various regions, and the particularities of the human brain. Rather than mystifying the brain, the book explains it as a material organ that arose within the evolution of life, situating human thought, judgment, and identity along a continuous line of natural history.

The final chapter, “Who, Ultimately, Are We?”, extends the preceding argument into human ontology. Sections titled “Imagining LUCA (the Last Universal Common Ancestor),” “Earth and Life,” and “Becoming Human” connect the common ancestry of life, the conditions of Earth, and human evolution to reconsider our place in the world. In the end, the head this book describes is no mere body part, but a composite of organs that smell, taste, chew, hear, balance, see, and think—within which is compressed the immense transformation from the origin of life to the emergence of humankind.

The Origin of the Human Head might be summarized thus: to understand the human being, one cannot look at humanity alone, but must look also at the cell, the organ, the animal, and the entire history of life on Earth.

In other words, The Origin of the Human Head is a work of popular science that does not stop at anatomically describing each organ of the head, but asks why these organs came into being, how they changed, and how they made possible the very existence we call human.

Through this book, we come to understand the nose and mouth, the jaw and teeth, the ears and eyes, the skull and brain, not as separate parts but as a single evolutionary narrative, and to read the human head as both a medical subject and a product of the history of life. The book brings together a popular anatomy of the human body, a story of evolution, and a scientific reflection on human identity.

July 5, 2026