A virtual-reality study has examined how easily human hunters might have detected fallow deer in woodland resembling the deciduous broad-leaved forests of interglacial Northwest Europe during the middle to late Pleistocene.
Researchers from Bournemouth University and the Natural History Museum created simulated hunting scenes and conducted two online target-present/absent visual-search experiments. The first involved 100 participants and 16,800 trials, while the second included 107 participants and 19,268 trials.
The experiments tested several factors that could affect whether a deer was noticed, including its distance from the observer, coat coloration and orientation. The researchers compared dappled, dark and albino deer within the virtual environment.
The naturally common dappled pattern appeared to make deer harder to detect than some other conditions, with an effect that could exceed the concealment provided simply by increasing distance from the observer. However, dappled deer were not the most difficult to locate among all the color variants tested.
Orientation produced a clearer difference. Deer shown from the side or at a 45-degree angle were significantly easier for participants to find than deer presented head-on. The researchers suggest that lateral and oblique views preserve the animal’s recognizable overall shape, while a frontal view may obscure those identifying features.
The findings also bear on proposed hunting lesions identified on deer bones from the archaeological record. The authors discuss the possibility that such injuries were primarily produced by projectiles directed at animals viewed from the side or at an oblique angle. That interpretation is consistent with the experiment’s results, although the virtual tests address visibility rather than directly establishing how any archaeological lesion was caused.
The study’s authors were Peter J. Allen, Jan M. Wiener, Christos Gatzidis, Chris B. Stringer and John R. Stewart. The work was partially funded by the Centre for Digital Entertainment, with additional research support acknowledged from the Calleva Foundation and the Human Origins Research Fund.
