Human zoos, also known as ethnological expositions, were a colonial practice of publicly displaying people, usually in a so-called "natural" or "primitive" state. They were most prominent during the 19th and 20th centuries. These displays often emphasized the supposed inferiority of the exhibits' culture, and implied the superiority of "Western society", through tropes that depicted marginalized groups as "savage". They then developed into independent displays emphasizing the exhibits' inferiority to western culture and providing further justification for their subjugation. Such displays featured in multiple colonial exhibitions and at temporary exhibitions in animal zoos.

The term "human zoo" was not generally used by contemporaries of the shows, and was popularised by the French researcher Pascal Blanchard. The term has been criticised for denying the agency of the shows' non-European performers.

According to Sandra Koutsoukos, the term "human zoos" was likely coined by French historians and anthropologists and first appeared in a 2002 publication. It is widely used in academia to critique the inhumanity and racism of events that displayed people from cultures deemed "exotic" or "savage".

The abstract concept of human displays in zoos has been documented throughout the duration of colonial history. In the Western Hemisphere, one of the earliest-known zoos, that of Moctezuma in Mexico, consisted not only of a vast collection of animals, but also exhibited humans, for example, dwarves, albinos and hunchbacks.

During the Renaissance, the Medici developed a large menagerie in Rome. In the 16th century, Cardinal Hippolytus Medici had a collection of people of different races as well as exotic animals. He is reported as having a troupe of so-called Savages, speaking over twenty languages; there were also Moors, Tartars, Indians, Turks and Africans. In 1691, Englishman William Dampier exhibited a tattooed native of Miangas whom he bought when he was in Mindanao. He also intended to exhibit the man's mother to earn more profit, but the mother died at sea. The man was named Jeoly, falsely branded as "Prince Giolo" to attract more audience, and was exhibited for three months straight until he died of smallpox in London.

One of the first modern public human exhibitions was P. T. Barnum's exhibition of Joice Heth on 25 February 1835 and, subsequently, the Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker. These exhibitions were common in freak shows. Another famous example was that of Saartjie Baartman of the Namaqua, often referred to as the Hottentot Venus, who was displayed in London and France until her death in 1815.

During the 1850s, Maximo and Bartola, two microcephalic children from El Salvador, were exhibited in the US and Europe under the names Aztec Children and Aztec Lilliputians. However, human zoos would become common only in the 1870s in the midst of the New Imperialism period.

From 1936 to 1943, the Canadian province of Ontario displayed five White French Canadian quintuplets, whom the provincial government had removed from their birth family, in a human zoo called Quintland.