The inspiration for this book originates with Professor Geoffrey Ainsworth Harrison of the University of Oxford, who taught me and many others the value of the evolutionary approach to human biology. The third edition of the textbook he wrote with Paul Baker and others (Harrison et al. 1988) was a defining part of the curriculum at Oxford and I draw strongly on the approach of that volume in this book. He also introduced us to literature on western diseases published in the 1970s and 1980s by Boyden, and by Trowell and Burkitt, described at the beginning of Chapter 1. His supervision of my postgraduate work provided invaluable further opportunity to learn from his methods and ideas. In my subsequent career I have benefited greatly from this solid and stimulating foundation.

In my own teaching of advanced undergraduates and graduate students at Durham University I have felt the lack of an up-to-date equivalent of these texts, a feeling that was the main motivation for me to write this book. In the intervening years I have also benefited from exposure to epidemiological research on cardiovascular disease and other western diseases, and I hope that the end result profits from my learning beyond anthropology. My aim has been to draw these two approaches together to create a new synthesis. I am aware, of course, that in aiming for such a synthesis I have failed to provide the level of evolutionary theory that some evolutionary biologists and biological anthropologists would wish to see, while offering less detail of biomedical and epidemiological research than might be expected from the other side.