For ninety-five percent of our evolutionary history humans lived as hunters and gatherers. Today, a tiny fraction of the World's population practices this form of ecology and it will soon disappear. Topics include: human global settlement and physical adaptations to varying climates; hunter-gatherer life histories, population demographics, diet and disease; the late Pleistocene-Holocene archaeology of hunters and gatherers based on case studies from Australasia, Africa and the Americans; hunter gatherer land use, resource exploitation and manipulation of the environment: and the question of mega faunal extinctions.

Note: this course was previously offered as BIOS3721 but changed effective semester 1 2017