Antlers, myth, and a word that once meant any wild beast
True deer belong to Cervidae, split between Cervinae and Capreolinae subfamilies. Males of nearly every species grow and shed bony antlers each year; female reindeer do too. From Paleolithic cave art to venison and buckskin, deer have shaped human culture across continents.
Deer are hoofed, cud-chewing mammals, and in almost every species the males, along with female reindeer, grow a fresh set of antlers each year; the water deer is the exception. Those antlers are outgrowths of skull bone, often used when males fight. Musk deer and chevrotains look similar and are also ruminants, yet they form separate families not especially close to Cervidae. Old English dēor meant any wild creature, and only around 1500 did English narrow it to the modern sense, while Dutch dier, German Tier and Norwegian dyr still simply mean animal.
The vocabulary shifts with size and dialect: buck and doe for many species, stag for a male red deer, bull and cow for the big kinds. In older usage a hart was a male past five and a hind a female of three or more; the young are fawns or calves, a castrated male is a havier, and the adjective cervine comes from Latin cervus. Many deer are edge dwellers, sheltering in woods and thickets while feeding on open prairie or savanna, so opening clearings in a forest can actually help them by letting grasses and herbs sprout.
Native deer occur on every continent except Antarctica and Australia, and Africa's only one is the Barbary stag, a red deer subspecies confined to the Atlas Mountains. Moose, elk, caribou, mule deer and whitetails, the full North American roster, overlap in the Canadian Rockies between Alberta and British Columbia. Eurasia holds the most species, most of them in Asia: forests bordering North Korea, Manchuria and Russia's Ussuri region host Siberian roe deer, sika, elk and moose, while India's Indo-Gangetic Plain and Nepal's Terai shelter chital, hog deer, barasingha and sambar. Europe's wild fallow deer descend from escaped park animals introduced by people.
Humans have lived with deer for a very long time. They appear in Paleolithic cave paintings and on the coat of arms of Åland, and they supply venison, buckskin and antler knife handles. Han Chinese, Turkic, Tungusic, Mongolian and Korean peoples farmed sika, elk and other species for their antlers, and several Siberian peoples keep semi-domesticated caribou much as the Sami do. Nineteenth-century acclimatisation releases left Australia with six established introduced species, and red deer shipped to New Zealand in 1851 are now ordinary farm animals there.
Source: Deer
