Eco-cultural niches of early human and hominid populations are of considerable interest, and indeed are the focus of this workshop/meeting. The idea of an eco-cultural niche is an adaptation of the concept of a fundamental ecological niche: the set of environmental values within which a species is able to have non-negative population growth, and to thereby maintain populations in the long term. The concept of a fundamental ecological niche has offered a set of guiding principles in the field of distributional ecology regarding non-hominid species: (1) it is an upscaling of physiological tolerances; (2) as such, it should be a convex subset of environmental space; (3) dispersal may take individuals of a species outside of its suitable areas (i.e., those sites with environments that are within the fundamental niche). However, (4) biotic interactions may modify the simple constraints of the fundamental niche, (5) existing environmental combinations may not include all possible favorable environmental combinations, and (6) dispersal limitations may reduce still further the parts of the fundamental niche that are observable. This conceptual summary was developed for and has been applied to understanding distributions of non-hominid species; how this conceptual framework should (or should not) be applied to early humans and other hominids, with their complex behavior, cultural transmission, and non-genetic adaptations—the topics that come under the term eco-cultural niche modeling—must be explored and discussed in detail.