Nutrition, Disease and the Environment

All primates (non-human and human) have the capacity for flexible biological responses to environmental change. Due to the wide range of environments in which primate species are found this flexibility often results in extreme adaptability in diet and food intake. This course looks at this dietary flexibility and how it may impact or limit nutritional intake across time and space and in turn how this may impact issues of health and population viability. Using both cross-species and cross-cultural comparative approaches this course will specifically explore how nutrition relates to disease dynamics and health in various physical environments across all primates, both extinct and extant. In the first part of the course, we will look at nutrition and disease through the lens of human behavioural ecology. Topics include evolutionary medicine, foraging models, parental investment and parent-offspring conflict, and host-pathogen coevolution. In the second part, we will consider evidence from the fossil record to understand the evolution of extinct hominin diets over the last 4 million years, physical and behavioural adaptations to different environments, and the relationship between nutrition and brain size increases in our extinct hominin ancestors and relatives; In the third part we will think about models of food selection from a primatology perspective and how data from non-human primates can be used to better understand patterns of over and undernutrition in humans along with how patterns of change in nutritional intake can impact pregnancy outcomes and child development.