Behavioral ecology is the study of adaptive behavior in relation to social and environmental circumstances. Analysts working from this perspective hold that the reproductive strategies and decision-making capacities of all living organisms-including humans-are shaped by natural selection. Archaeologists have been using this proposition in the study of past human behavior for more than 30 years. Significant insights on variation in prehistoric human subsistence, life history, social organization, and their respective fossil and archaeological consequences have been among the more important results.

By integrating foraging models developed in behavioral ecology with measures of variability in faunal remains, zooarchaeological studies have made important contributions toward understanding prehistoric resource use and the dynamic interactions between humans and their prey. However, where archaeological studies are unable to quantify the costs and benefits associated with prey acquisition, they often rely on proxy measures such as prey body size, assuming it to be positively correlated with return rate. To examine this hypothesis, we analyze the results of 1,347 adult foraging bouts and 649 focal follows of contemporary Martu foragers in Australia's Western Desert. The data show that prey mobility is highly correlated with prey body size and is inversely related to pursuit success—meaning that prey body size is often an inappropriate proxy measure of prey rank. This has broad implications for future studies that rely on taxonomic measures of prey abundance to examine prehistoric human ecology, including but not limited to economic intensification, socioeconomic complexity, resource sustainability, and overexploitation.

Aboriginal burning in Australia has long been assumed to be a ''resource management'' strategy, but no quantitative tests of this hypothesis have ever been conducted. We combine ethnographic observations of contemporary Aboriginal hunting and burning with satellite image analysis of anthropogenic and natural landscape structure to demonstrate the processes through which Aboriginal burning shapes arid-zone vegetational diversity. Anthropogenic landscapes contain a greater diversity of successional stages than landscapes under a lightning fire regime, and differences are of scale, not of kind. Landscape scale is directly linked to foraging for small, burrowed prey (monitor lizards), which is a specialty of Aboriginal women. The maintenance of small-scale habitat mosaics increases small-animal hunting productivity. These results have implications for understanding the unique biodiversity of the Australian continent, through time and space. In particular, anthropogenic influences on the habitat structure of paleolandscapes are likely to be spatially localized and linked to less mobile, ''broad-spectrum'' foraging economies.fire ecology ͉ human behavioral ecology ͉ hunter-gatherers ͉ resource management

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Anthropogenic fire is a form of ecosystem engineering that creates greater landscape patchiness at small spatial scales: such rescaling of patch diversity through mosaic burning has been argued to be a form of niche construction, the loss of which may have precipitated the decline and extinction of many endemic species in the Western Desert of Australia. We find evidence to support this hypothesis relative to one keystone species, the sand monitor lizard (Varanus gouldii). Paradoxically, V. gouldii populations are higher where Aboriginal hunting is most intense. This effect is driven by an increase in V. gouldii densities near successional edges, which is higher in landscapes that experience extensive human burning. Over time, the positive effects of patch mosaic burning while hunting overwhelm the negative effects of predation in recently burned areas to produce overall positive impacts on lizard populations. These results offer critical insights into the maintenance of animal communities in the desert, supporting the hypothesis that the current high rate of endemic species decline among small animals may be linked to the interaction between invasive species and mid-century removal of Aboriginal niche construction through hunting and patch mosaic burning.

Due to our intensive subsistence and habitat-modification strategies-including broad-spectrum harvesting and predation, widespread landscape burning, settlement construction, and translocation of other species-humans have major roles as ecological actors who influence fundamental trophic interactions. Here we review how the long-term history of human-environment interaction has shaped the evolutionary biology of diverse non-human, non-domesticated species. Clear examples of anthropogenic effects on non-human morphological evolution have been documented in modern studies of substantial changes to body size or other major traits in terrestrial and aquatic vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants in response to selective human harvesting, urbanized habitats, and human-mediated translocation. Meanwhile, archaeological records of harvested marine invertebrates and terrestrial vertebrates suggest that similar processes extend considerably into prehistory, perhaps to 50,000 yr BP or earlier. These results are consistent with palaeoenvironmental and other records that demonstrate long-term human habitat modification and intensive harvesting practices. Thus, while considerable attention has been focused on recent human impacts on 'natural' habitats, integrated evidence from modern biology and archaeology suggests a deep history of human entanglement with our ecosystems including substantial effects on the evolutionary biology of non-human taxa. The number and magnitude of such effects will probably increase given the continued intensification of anthropogenic activities and ecosystem impacts, including climate change and direct genetic modification.

Offspring provisioning is commonly referenced as the most important influence on men's and women's foraging decisions. However, the provisioning of other adults may be equally important in determining gender differences in resource choice, particularly when the goals of provisioning offspring versus others cannot be met with the acquisition of the same resources. Here, we examine how resources vary in their expected daily energetic returns and in the variance or risk around those returns. We predict that when available resources impose no trade-off between risk and energy, the targets of men's and women's foraging will converge on high-energy, low-risk resources that allow for the simultaneous provisioning of offspring and others. However, when minimizing risk and maximizing energy trade-off with one another, we expect men's foraging to focus on provisioning others through the unreliable acquisition of large harvests, while women focus on reliably acquiring smaller harvests to feed offspring. We test these predictions with foraging data from three populations (Aché, Martu and Meriam). The results uphold the predictions, suggesting that men's and women's foraging interests converge when highenergy resources can be reliably acquired, but diverge when higher-energy resources are associated with higher levels of risk. Social factors, particularly the availability of alloparental support, may also play a major role.

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