Originally published: London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The beginning -- The birth of history -- The world at 20,000 BC -- Western Asia -- Fires and flowers -- Village life in the oak woodland -- On the banks of the Euphrates -- One thousand years of drought -- The founding of Jericho -- Pictograms and pillars -- In the valley of ravens -- The town of ghosts -- Heaven and hell at ÇatlahoÌyuÌk -- Three days on Cyprus -- Europe -- Pioneers in northern lands -- With reindeer hunters -- At Star Carr -- Last of the cave painters -- Coastal catastrophe -- Two villages in Southeast Europe -- Islands of the dead -- At the frontier -- A mesolithic legacy -- A Scottish envoi -- The Americans -- Searching for the first Americans -- American past in the present -- On the banks of Chinchihuapi -- Explorers in a restless landscape -- Clovis hunters on trial -- Virginity reconsidered -- Herders and the 'Christ-child' -- A double-take in the Oaxaca Valley -- To Koster -- Salmon fishing and the gift of history -- Greater Australia and East Asia -- A lost world revealed -- Body sculpture at Kow Swamp -- Across the arid zone -- Fighting men and a serpent's birth -- Pigs and gardens in the highlands -- Lonesome in Sundaland -- Down the Yangtze -- With the Jomon -- Summer in the Arctic -- South Asia -- A passage through India -- A long walk across the Hindu Kush -- Vultures of the Zagros -- Approaching civilisation in Mesopotamia -- Africa -- Baked fish by the Nile -- On Lukenya Hill -- Frogs' legs and ostrich eggs -- A South African tour -- Thunderbolts in the tropics -- Sheep and cattle in the Sahara -- Farmers in the Nile Valley and beyond.