Ancestors. Our ancient heritage ; Our unique heritage
Beginnings. The Australopithecines and their kin ; Man the hunter, woman the gatherer ; Bones, butchery, and the scavenging hypothesis ; A closer look at the fossil record ; History in the body: evolutionary anatomy and molecular markers ; Cooking
Foraging. The Upper Paleolithic revolution? ; The Late Pleistocene world ; New tools, new tactics: the food quest in the Late Pleistocene
Farmers. The questions ; The natural history of agriculture ; The human factor : decisions and revisions ; Better living through chemistry ; Agriculture, adaptation, strategy, and tradition
Hunger. Food supply in a changing environment ; Hunger in nature ; Hunger and human societies ; Fighting hunger: culture and creativity
Abundance. Abundance in nature ; Surplus, sharing, and human socities ; The uses of abundance ; Abundance, diet, and health: the effects of social inequality ; Beyond storage and sharing: surplus as symbol
Contacts. Acceptance and dispersal of novel foods ; The spread of agriculture in prehistoric Europe ; Eating, drinking, and Roman expansion ; Peaches, cowpeas, melons, and hogs: old world foods in Southeastern North America ; The global reach of foodways
Extinctions. Man versus mammoth ; Invasion of the island snatchers ; Firestarters ; Chewing the scenery
Final thoughts. Nostalgia for the Pleistocene ; Hunger on a crowded planet ; The conservation conundrum ; Food, prehistory, and human nature.