Utilising virtual environments to assess the visibility of fallow deer to human hunters

Abstract

Abstract Visual detection of prey is a critical element of human hunting behaviour. We examine how factors such as prey coat colouration, distance to the observer and orientation influence the ability of humans to visually locate fallow deer in simulated virtual environments. The simulated environment is a deciduous broad-leaved woodland that corresponds to the vegetation in interglacial Northwest Europe during the middle to late Pleistocene. We conducted two online target-present/absent visual search experiments (Experiment 1: N = 100, 16,800 trials; Experiment 2: N = 107, 19,268 trials). Results indicate that while the dappled coat colouration most commonly found in nature may confer advantages for avoiding detection beyond those caused by increased distance to the observer, it does not represent the most difficult-to-locate colouration among the variants investigated (dappled, dark, and albino). Our findings reveal that deer presented in lateral or oblique (45-degree) orientations are significantly easier to locate than those presented head-on. A principal factor potentially underlying this effect is that lateral and oblique views preserve the prototypical shape of the deer, whereas the head-on orientation may obscure these defining features. This is discussed regarding findings of proposed hunting lesions on bones in the archaeological record. This suggests that the lesions were mostly caused by projectiles targeting deer at lateral or oblique orientations to the hunter, which is consistent with our results.