An understanding of the ecology of any species must include a knowledge of what it eats, where it finds it (and also water) and how it catches and processes it, where, when and with whom it breeds, where it obtains shelter and how it avoids predation and competition. These are problems common to all animals and need to be examined at different scales in order to fully comprehend them: daily, seasonal and inter-annual cycles may all have a bearing on a population's survival. Similarly, the spatial scale of operation of individuals (territories/habitats), groups (home ranges/landscapes), metapopulations (regions) and the species as a whole (geographical range) are critical in understanding its ecology. It follows that the patterns we may observe may be heavily dependent on the scale at which we observe them. In the case of humans one thing that will emerge throughout is that there are problems associated with generalisation at small scales. The world of Pleistocene humans, especially Neanderthals, has to be seen as a spatio-temporal mosaic at the scale of human generations. This makes it very difficult, as we will see, to establish generalised hypotheses other than at the large-scale, ultimate, levels of causality. I will now examine aspects of Neanderthal and Modern Human ecology from the perspective of resource acquisition with the view of comparing and contrasting the two forms.

Food and feeding ecology

Any comprehensive theory of hominid evolution must rest heavily on a theory of resource acquisition (Kaplan & Hill, 1992).