Abstract
Visual search experiments used in the field of psychology may be applied to investigate the relationship between environments and prey detection rates that could influence hunting behaviours in ancient humans. Two lab-based experiments were designed to examine the effects of differing virtual environments, representing Marine Isotope Stage 3 (MIS3) in Europe, on participants’ ability to locate prey. The results show that prey detection performance is highly influenced by vegetation structure, both in terms of the biome type (wooded vs. grassland environments) and the density of the vegetation (trees in wooded and shrubs in grassland environments). However, the density of vegetation has a greater relative effect in grassland than in wooded biomes. Closer examination of the transition between biomes (relative percentages of trees vs. shrubs) at the same vegetative density shows a non-linear relationship between prey detection performance and the relative tree to shrub percentages. Changes in the distribution of biomes occurred throughout the Quaternary. The composition of those biomes will have likely affected hominin hunting behaviours because of their intermediary effects on prey detection performance. This may, therefore, have played a role in the turn-overs of hunter-gatherer hominin populations during MIS3 and at other times in the Quaternary.
Highlights
During the Milankovitch and sub-Milankovitch climate oscillations, vegetation varied from more open during relatively cold episodes, to more closed, during warmer times[5]
We do not see any reason to assume the same species of trees and shrubs would have looked any different during Marine Isotope Stage 3 (MIS3), and assume that our virtual environments are a realistic proxy for the MIS3 environments they represent
In line with the requirements for pursuit-hunting[12], we hypothesised that participants would be able to detect prey at much further distances in an open grassland environment, as compared to a closed wooded biome, where both biomes are populated with the same number of vegetation objects
Summary
During the Milankovitch and sub-Milankovitch climate oscillations, vegetation varied from more open during relatively cold episodes, to more closed, during warmer times[5]. The first experiment investigated the effects of increasing vegetative density on the ability of participants to detect a prey animal (a red deer Cervus elaphus) within both wooded and grassland biomes.
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