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Investigating the Effect of the Environment on Prey Detection Ability in Humans

Allen, Peter J
; 
Wiener, Jan M
; 
Gatzidis, Christos
; ; 
Stewart, John R
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2019-05-15
Submitted Date
2018-11-12
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behavioural ecology
biological anthropology
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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.
Citation
Allen, P.J., Wiener, J.M., Gatzidis, C. et al. Investigating the Effect of the Environment on Prey Detection Ability in Humans. Sci Rep 9, 7445 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-43797-0
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Springer Science and Business Media LLC
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Scientific Reports
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http://hdl.handle.net/10141/623304
DOI
10.1038/s41598-019-43797-0
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Copyright © The Author(s) 2019. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The attached file is the published version of the article
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2045-2322
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2045-2322
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