There seems little room for argument with Alfred Kroeber's assertion that a society comes from more than its natural environment. Yet we also cannot deny the ecological realities that the G/wi acknowledge. These two facts drive anthropology's investigation into the relationship between human society and the environment. Although relating the environment to cultural diversity in a consistent theoretical fashion is a daunting task, anthropology has made some gains by uniting an ecological with an evolutionary perspective in a field known as human behavioral ecology. We will consider this theoretical paradigm here, but let's first place it into its historical context by considering two earlier paradigms that privileged the role of the environment – the culture area concept and cultural ecology – since some of the research and data discussed in this book were undertaken within them.