Introduction
Throughout history some 50 billion people have inhabited the earth; 10,000 years ago most societies were involved in the harvest of meat. Five hundred years ago, 1% were; by 1900 less than 0.001% were (Lee and Devore 1968). A propensity to eat game meat has changed inversely with human population size and, predictably, so has the abundance of native large mammalian carnivores (Weber and Rabinowitz 1996; Woodroffe 2000). With the replacement of carnivores by human hunters it would be surprising if the ecological effects of native carnivores and humans did not differ in the modern world. One oft-cited ecological rationale for encouraging human hunting is that it substitutes for the role once played by native carnivores. To evaluate this issue, I ask a deceptively simple question: Are human hunters functionally equivalent to large mammalian carnivores?