| | List of Tables and Figures | p. xi |
| | Prologue: At the Airport | p. 1 |
| | An airport scene | |
| | Why study traditional societies? | |
| | States | |
| | Types of traditional societies | |
| | Approaches, causes, and sources | |
| | A small book about a big subject | |
| | Plan of the book | |
| | Setting the Stage by Dividing Space | |
| | Friends, Enemies, Strangers, and Traders | p. 37 |
| | A boundary | |
| | Mutually exclusive territories | |
| | Non-exclusive land use | |
| | Friends, enemies, and strangers | |
| | First contacts | |
| | Trade and traders | |
| | Market economies | |
| | Traditional forms of trade | |
| | Traditional trade items | |
| | Who trades what? | |
| | Tiny nations | |
| | Peace and War | |
| | Compensation for the Death of a Child | p. 79 |
| | An accident | |
| | A ceremony | |
| | What if ...? | |
| | What the state did | |
| | New Guinea compensation | |
| | Life-long relationships | |
| | Other non-state societies | |
| | State authority | |
| | State civil justice | |
| | Defects in state civil justice | |
| | State criminal justice | |
| | Restorative justice | |
| | Advantages and their price | |
| | A Short Chapter, About a Tiny War | p. 119 |
| | The Dani War | |
| | The war's time-line | |
| | The war's death toll | |
| | A Longer Chapter, About Many Wars | p. 129 |
| | Definitions of war | |
| | Sources of information | |
| | Forms of traditional warfare | |
| | Mortality rates | |
| | Similarities and differences | |
| | Ending warfare | |
| | Effects of European contact | |
| | Warlike animals, peaceful peoples | |
| | Motives for traditional war | |
| | Ultimate reasons | |
| | Whom do people fight? | |
| | Forgetting Pearl Harbor | |
| | Young and Old | |
| | Bringing Up Children | p. 173 |
| | Comparisons of child-rearing | |
| | Childbirth | |
| | Infanticide | |
| | Weaning and birth interval | |
| | On-demand nursing | |
| | Infant-adult contact | |
| | Fathers and allo-parents | |
| | Responses to crying infants | |
| | Physical punishment | |
| | Child autonomy | |
| | Multi-age playgroups | |
| | Child play and education | |
| | Their kids and our kids | |
| | The Treatment of Old People: Cherish, Abandon, or Kill? | p. 210 |
| | The elderly | |
| | Expectations about eldercare | |
| | Why abandon or kill? | |
| | Usefulness of old people | |
| | Society's values | |
| | Society's rules | |
| | Better or worse today? | |
| | What to do with older people? | |
| | Danger and Response | |
| | Constructive Paranoia | p. 243 |
| | Attitudes towards danger | |
| | A night visit | |
| | A boat accident | |
| | Just a stick in the ground | |
| | Taking risks | |
| | Risks and talkativeness | |
| | Lions and Other Dangers | p. 276 |
| | Dangers of traditional life | |
| | Accidents | |
| | Vigilance | |
| | Human violence | |
| | Diseases | |
| | Responses to diseases | |
| | Starvation | |
| | Unpredictable food shortages | |
| | Scatter your land | |
| | Seasonality and food storage | |
| | Diet broadening | |
| | Aggregation and dispersal | |
| | Responses to danger | |
| | Religion, Language, and Health | |
| | What Electric Eels Tell Us About the Evolution of Religion | p. 323 |
| | Questions about religion | |
| | Definitions of religion | |
| | Functions and electric eels | |
| | The search for causal explanations | |
| | Supernatural beliefs | |
| | Religion's function of explanation | |
| | Defusing anxiety | |
| | Providing comfort | |
| | Organization and obedience | |
| | Codes of behavior towards strangers | |
| | Justifying war | |
| | Badges of commitment | |
| | Measures of religious success | |
| | Changes in religion's functions | |
| | Speaking in Many Tongues | p. 369 |
| | Multilingualism | |
| | The world's language total | |
| | How languages evolve | |
| | Geography of language diversity | |
| | Traditional multilingualism | |
| | Benefits of bilingualism | |
| | Alzheimer's disease | |
| | Vanishing languages | |
| | How languages disappear | |
| | Are minority languages harmful? | |
| | Why preserve languages? | |
| | How can we protect languages? | |
| | Salt, Sugar, Fat, and Sloth | p. 410 |
| | Non-communicable diseases | |
| | Our salt intake | |
| | Salt and blood pressure | |
| | Causes of hypertension | |
| | Dietary sources of salt | |
| | Diabetes | |
| | Types of diabetes | |
| | Genes, environment, and diabetes | |
| | Pima Indians and Nauru Islanders | |
| | Diabetes in India | |
| | Benefits of genes for diabetes | |
| | Why is diabetes low in Europeans? | |
| | The future of non-communicable diseases | |
| | Epilogue: At Another Airport | p. 452 |
| | From the jungle to the 405 | |
| | Advantages of the modern world | |
| | Advantages of the traditional world | |
| | What can we learn? | |
| | Acknowledgments | p. 467 |
| | Further Readings | p. 471 |
| | Index | p. 483 |
| | Illustration Credits | p. 499 |