Mellars obtained his Master of Arts, Doctor of Philosophy and Doctor of Science degrees at the University of Cambridge, where he was a student of Fitzwilliam College, then taught for ten years in the Archaeology Department at Sheffield University before returning to Cambridge in 1980, where he became a fellow of Corpus Christi College.
He is Professor Emeritus of Prehistory and Human Evolution in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge. He briefly served as acting master of the college in 2007, following the resignation of Sir Alan Wilson, but six months later lost the election to become the formal successor to Wilson to Oliver Rackham. He has held visiting positions at the State University of New York at Binghamton and the Australian National University.
He is also a trustee of the American Council on Exercise Foundation.
Mellars was knighted in the 2010 New Year Honours for services to scholarship. His recent research has concentrated on the behaviour and archaeology of Neanderthal populations in Europe, and their replacement by Homo sapiens 40,000 years ago.
Mellars contributed to the three part British Broadcasting Corporation mini-series "Dawn of Manitoba — The Story of Human Evolution" (2000). He has also studied the way in which mesolithic hunter-gatherer populations in Britain adapted to climate changes following the last ice age.
He has carried out excavations on early Mesolithic sites at Oronsay in the Inner Hebrides in Scotland and published the results from work at Star Carr in North Yorkshire.
He is a Fellow of the British Academy, member of the Academia Europaea and served as president of the Prehistoric Society.
