Lists in Python are ordered sets of elements that use zero-based indexing. A list defined with five elements will have the first element at index 0 and the last element at index 4. Lists can be sliced to extract subsets, with optional start and end indices. If the start index is omitted, it defaults to 0, and if the end index is omitted for a list of length n it defaults to n. Lists support methods like append to add a single element to the end, extend to concatenate two lists, and insert to add an element at a specific index.