Prologue: A very bad day on Planet Earth
1: Mystery of the missing megavolcano. Serendipity ; Frozen in the ice ; Data in Davy Jones's locker ; Blowing the case wide open ; Mystery solved
2: Vulcan's fury. The forge of Hephaistos ; Incineration ; Why do volcanoes behave so differently from one another?
3: Land of the killer volcanoes. The Indonesian arc ; Krakatau cracks ; Tambora and the year without a summer ; Supervolcanoes
4: Clues in your genes. The blueprint of life ; Too many genes ; Clockwork DNA ; "Mitochondrial Eve" ; Through the bottleneck ; Bottlenecks in humans
5: Roots. The third chimpanzee ; Fossils versus molecules ; Out of Eurasia? ; The Piltdown hoax
6: Out of Africa. The Taung Child, Mrs. Ples, and Dear Boy ; The human lineage ; Our genus, Homo ; Modern humans evolve
7: Humanity at the crossroads. Consilience ; The threads of Toba ; Bottlenecks everywhere ; Testing the hypothesis ; The critics strike back ; Where do we stand now?
8: Volcanoes of doom. The "Big Five" ; The doom of the dinosaurs ; "The Great Dying" ; The third eruption ; Volcanoes and extinction
9: Future shocks. Could it happen again? ; Supervolcanoes in America ; A perspective on catastrophes.