Allen, P.J., Wiener, J.M., Gatzidis, C., Stringer, C.B. and Stewart, J. R., 2019. Investigating the Effect of the Environment on Prey Detection Ability in Humans. Scientific Reports, 9 (1), 7445.
Full text available as:
|
PDF (OPEN ACCESS ARTICLE)
s41598-019-43797-0.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. 1MB | |
|
PDF
Allen et al - Scientific Reports - Suppl. Info.pdf - Supplemental Material Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. 128kB | |
Copyright to original material in this document is with the original owner(s). Access to this content through BURO is granted on condition that you use it only for research, scholarly or other non-commercial purposes. If you wish to use it for any other purposes, you must contact BU via BURO@bournemouth.ac.uk. Any third party copyright material in this document remains the property of its respective owner(s). BU grants no licence for further use of that third party material. |
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-43797-0
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.
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
ISSN: | 2045-2322 |
Additional Information: | Supplementary information accompanies this paper at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-43797-0. |
Group: | Faculty of Science & Technology |
ID Code: | 33578 |
Deposited By: | Symplectic RT2 |
Deposited On: | 03 Mar 2020 09:57 |
Last Modified: | 14 Mar 2022 14:20 |
Downloads
Downloads per month over past year
Repository Staff Only - |