The riddle of the red deer of Orkney and the Outer Hebrides has just become even more baffling. Stags and hinds arrived with humans – but not from Scandinavia, nor from the British mainland.

And they can only have arrived by ship: transported by enterprising Neolithic colonists who had learned to treat deer as livestock, long ago and far away in Europe.

Scientists report in the Proceedings B of the Royal Society that they studied sequences of DNA from Cervus elephus on the Outer Hebrides and from Orkney to settle the question of origins.

And they established that the island deer were not introduced from Scotland. That is, they were not related to red deer already roaming the mainland. Their results were also “inconsistent with an origin from Ireland or Norway.”

So the only other possible answer is, they say “long distance maritime travel by Neolithic people … from an unknown source.”

The finding also suggests that new stone age humans found a way to domesticate red deer.

“Domestication is probably a misleading word for it,” said David Stanton, of Cardiff University, who led the genetic analysis. “We consider them to be wild animals, but wild could probably be put in inverted commas. There was a stronger relationship with these animals than we previously thought.”

The Orkney and Hebridean invasions could only have happened after the retreat of the ice 10,000 years ago, and, says Jacqui Mulville, a bioarchaeologist at Cardiff University, red deer kept the first mainland Britons alive: they provided food, skins, sinews, bones and tools made of antler.

Almost no evidence survives of Neolithic sea-going craft. But the Scottish islands are separated from the mainland by deep waters, at distances beyond any deer’s swimming capability.

“All terrestrial fauna must have been deliberately introduced by seafaring people,” Dr Mulville says. “These people were sophisticated, skilled farmers, with large settlements. The islands were popular places to settle, with sufficient resources to allow people to thrive. The coastal environments offered a wide range of marine, coastal, terrestrial and aerial resources and these people utilised them all.”

Europe’s red deer probably survived the ice ages somewhere in the Iberian peninsula, and spread across the continent as the glaciers retreated. They were the ancient European’s first animal resource, until the arrival of farming from the Middle East. Although the genetic lineages of the island deer were unique, one at least matched deer fibre found in the clothing of Ötzi the Iceman, the copper age humanwho died on an Alpine glacier 5,000 years ago.

Dr Mulville called the results “surprising.”

“This evidence suggests we have misunderstood our relationship with this species. Perhaps humans managed deer, having long-term relationships with herds that allowed them to plan, capture and transport deer on longer voyages.”

The study, the scientists say, presents “the first attempts to understand the deliberate translocation of faunal species into insular Britain and track the source for these introductions.” And, they concede, the antlered invaders came from “a currently unidentified source population.”





