Tiny island deer in Panama hunted to extinction thousands of years ago

Date: March 3, 2016

Source: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute

Once there was a dwarf deer on an island in the Pacific, but residents hunted it to extinction 6,000 years ago. Knowing this may help to conserve conservation of deer on a neighboring island.

As polar ice caps melted at the end of the last Ice Age about 8,500 years ago, the global sea level rose and Panama's Pearl Islands were isolated from the mainland. A new archaeological study by a team including a Smithsonian scientist shows that several thousand years later pre-Columbian colonists hunted a dwarf deer to extinction on an island called Pedro González.

The settlers arrived on the 14-hectare island by sea 6,200 years ago and stayed for a maximum of eight centuries, farming maize and roots, fishing, gathering palm fruits and shellfish and hunting deer, opossums, agoutis, iguanas and large snakes--the major predators.

"When I was washing the animal bones from the first test cut in 2008, out fell a deer ankle bone called a calcaneum," said Richard Cooke, archaeologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and co-author of the study. "It was so tiny that I realized we had come across a population that had probably dwarfed through isolation."

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