The complex relationships between human populations and components of their environments are particularly intense within the Animal Kingdom. Humans and other animals evolved together for over 3 million years in Africa.While the span of coevolution is shorter in other parts of the world, the expansion of human populations and the growth of technology in recent millennia mean that no animal species is likely to be environmentally unaffected by the existence of Homo sapiens sapiens. Complementarily, as humans encounter and come to know other species, we find our lives interconnected in many subtle ways.

Paleolithic archaeology in the Old World developed from vertebrate paleontology in European caves and gravels, and thus since its nineteenth-century beginnings has employed vertebrate remains as rough guides to paleoclimates. Zooarchaeology (archaeozoology in Europe; osteoarchaeology) as it has developed recently is far from being a simple transfer of paleontological methods and assumptions to archaeological contexts. Most of the optimistic simplifying assumptions about animal remains in archaeological sites thatwere routinely applied in initial studies have been refuted in the past twenty years by the advance of taphonomic understanding. With their passage has come awareness of the rich complexity of information in faunal remains. No longer simply applied paleontology, faunal analysis is a specialization within archaeology whose practitioners conduct research alongside archaeologists. The methods derive from biology, paleontology, and archaeology; the theory is still immature. The goals of faunal analysis in archaeology necessarily diverge from those of paleontology, being anthropocentric by definition.