Wyoming Deer

Our premise is that hunter-gatherers fed off ungulates like deer & horse migrating from Doggerland into the present day East Midlands. A modern day equivalent is the spring Wyoming mule deer migration of up to 240 km (150 miles) over a 2 month period (figure 1). Pronghorn antelope in the same area travel 100 miles

Thousands of deer have followed the same route for 5,000 years from their drier low-elevation winter ranges to 500 m higher summer ranges. There they gain fat needed to survive the long winters and for rutting. The deer migrate at the pace of the green-up on the wetter elevations & may stop-over for several days in one location. Their autumnal return is dictated by the encroaching winter weather.

At Trappers Point a bottleneck created by two rivers on the migration route, several thousand years’ worth of mass ungulate killing in March/April is evidenced in the archaeological record. Pronghorn can travel at 60 mph, horse & deer 30 to 50 mph.

Figure 2 (click to open in new window) shows in blue the Wyoming deer migratory route based on telemetric monitoring. The brown polygons are stop-over sites.

The red route is the calculated LCP for humans using a Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) 1 arc (~30m resolution) digital elevation model. Clearly the deer follow a similar LCP model to humans as they graze the foothills of the Wind River Range. Thus it is reasonable to use LCPs in the East Midlands to model possible hunter-gatherer routes - as shown here.

Farndon Fields on the braided rivers Trent & Devon of the Pleistocene, likely offered such a bottleneck & stop over point for deer & horse migrating from Doggerland to higher pastures.

Least cost path (LCP) analysis identifies the most efficient human walk between two points based on the terrain & optimum energy expenditure. Increasing elevation raises journey time as does a downward slope of >12^o. Does LCP reflect the path that ungulates would take as well?