Introduction ANTHROPOLOGY: Where we came from A is for Amazon: Not all the sistahs picked berries The Cooking Ape: How fire made us human The Skin of Our Teeth: Our species survived a bottleneck. Just The Neanderthal Connection: Tell-tale genes Altruism''s Hidden Benefits: Being kind pays off The Earliest Americans: From Siberia to the Americas Agriculture: Our Worst Mistake?: The Neolithic Revolution Ötzi the Iceman: He didn''t die of natural causes The Bronze Age: Copper good, bronze better. Much better. The Long Mayan Drought: The end of Tikal, Palenque, Copan. ENGINEERING: Beyond Lego ® blocks Pyramid Scheme: Does the Great Pyramid incorporate pi? Mind the Gap!: A brief history of the arch The Antikythera Mechanism: A 2,000-year-old computer Perry Collins'' Overland Telegraph: A world-class miss The Most Expensive Lighthouse: California''s St. George Reef Panama: Linking the Oceans: Saving 5,000 miles of travel EVOLUTION: The single best idea ever Yo'' Mama''s a Fish!: Give or take 100 million generations Genetic vs. Cultural Evolution: In two Powerpoint® slides The Unity of Life: If it''s alive, it''s your cousin Evolution Isn''t Progress!: The meme that just won''t quit Are Men (and Women) from Mars?: Life began.where? Eohippus to Percheron: Evolution of the horse Darwin''s Bulldog: Thomas Huxley and the Great Debate Evolution''s Co-Discoverer: Crediting Alfred Russel Wallace The Other Evolutionist: Did a farmer upstage Darwin and Wallace? Dawn Redwoods: An overlooked branch of evolution EXPLORATION: To the ends of the Earth Fifth Century Pacific Crossing?: Evaluating the evidence The United States of Zheng: Showing the flag 600 years ago The Martellus Map: Was Columbus misled? Magellan''s Pacific: Linking the oceans Columbus of the Pacific: Friar Urdaneta''s "Volta do Mar" The Longitude Challenge: Latitude, easy.

Longitude, not so much Scott of the Antarctic: Reckless and/or brave? HEALTH: Our bodies, ourselves Hunter vs. Farmer and ADHD: Leave those kids alone Lactose-tolerance: Evolution in action Barbie Redux: That waist-to-hip ratio Sleep, Pray, Sleep: Are you a normal insomniac? When the Old World Met the New: Smallpox in America A Brief History of Vaccination: Anti-vaxxers aren''t new The Roots of Homeopathy: It''s BS (but with the best of intentions) An Uplifting Story: Is the bra a booby trap? INVENTIONS: Building better mousetraps The Real Wheel: Someone had to be first Unwrapping the Past: Reading a lump of charcoal A Brief History of Dildos: A penetrating account Perpetual Motion Machines: Fighting thermodynamics Spectacles and Telescopes: A small mystery Gutenberg''s Legacy: Inventor or synthesizer? Atoms: Solving the Invisible: Inventing our theory of matter Monsieur Sax''s Brass Clarinet: Creating that smooth sound Alice in (Photography) Wonderland: A math teacher''s hobby The Sound Guys: Edison and Berliner: Cylinders: 0; Discs: 1 The Golden Age of Crystal Sets: That 1920s sound The Quartz Crisis: Adventures in watchmaking Analog Youth to Digital Geezer: Trying to keep up Charon''s Obol, the Zahir and More: Riffing on coinage Mastodons in Greenland: How an invention helped recreate an ancient land LANGUAGE: Words, spoken and written Language: Nature or Nurture?: Or, is Chomsky irrelevant? Quest for our Mother Tongue: Making sense of "Proto-World" The Weirdness of English: Black sheep of Germanic languages No Celtic? Blame the Volcanoes: Why English lacks Celtic The Phoenician Connection: How English "softened" Lord, is it me? (Or, is it I?): The quest for "proper English" Homer''s Wine-dark Sea: Did the ancients see our colors? Invention of our Alphabet: From ox head to letter A Runes in the Ruins: Viking graffiti Black English: Simplify, simplify Whence "Britain": Not Brutus The Rosetta Stone: Deciphering the hieroglyphs When did Language Begin?: 100,000 or a million years ago The Vindolanda Tablets: Voices from Roman Britain Silent Reading and Word Breaks: How they''re related For the Week-hearted: Our curious seven-day period Hesiod: Farmer, Poet, Misogynist MYTHS: Stuff of dreams The Voynich Manuscript: It''s been decoded.again! Doubting Shakespeare: Stratford man or Stratford myth? Vlad, Vampires and Dracula: The warlord-diplomat behind the myth Fairy Tales: Fooling Sherlock Holmes'' creator Antarctic Atlantis: Looking for Plato''s mythical land The Myth of the Good Old Days: They weren''t King Arthur: Once and Future King The Great Flood: The reality behind the Noah story A Brief History of Hell: The myth to end all myths The Lure of Labyrinths: From Minotaur''s den to a meditative walk Attila, Scourge of God.and Diplomat: Beyond the myth The Myth of the Dark Ages: Time to drop the label NUMBERS: The magic of math The Number of the Beast: 666 or 616? Metering the Meter: First, go to the North Pole Measuring Our Lives : 60 minutes, 24 hours, 7 days, 52 weeks Archimedes'' Tomb: Anticipating calculus by two thousand years Roman and Arabic Numerals: Our debt to Leonardo of Pisa Halloween, Samhain, Jack o'' Lantern: Our pagan festivals A Funny Thing Happened to Pi: Finding its 10 trillionth digit SPACE: Earth''s eye view of the Universe Einstein, Newton and Eclipse of 1919: Fudging the results The Monk''s Tale: When the moon split in two Were the Old Days Shorter?: Or am I getting older? Impact! 50,000 BC: Arizona''s Barringer Crater Galileo''s Moons: Everything changed one night in 1610 Dinosaurs Died, Mammals Thrived: An ancient fluke put us here Vulcan, Missing in Action: Searching for Planet X Are We the World?: The problem with hubris Z is for Zodiac: I am Virgo, hear me roar.