the white coat variation is very much rarer still, although wild New Zealand herds often have a high melanistic percentage. Only bucks have antlers, which are broad and shovel-shaped (palmate) from three years. In the first two years the antler is a single spike. They are grazing animals; their preferred habitat is mixed woodland and open grassland. During the rut bucks spread out and females move between them; at that time of year fallow deer are relatively ungrouped compared with the rest of the year, when they try to stay together in groups of up to 150. Agile and fast in case of danger, fallow deer can run at a maximum speed of over short distances. Being naturally less muscular than other cervids such as the roe deer, they are not as fast. Fallow deer can also jump up to high and up to in length. History The European fallow deer was native to most of Europe during the last interglacial. Towards the end of the Pleistocene (during the last Ice Age) the distribution was restricted to the Middle East and refugia in parts of the Mediterranean Basin: Sicily, Anatolia and the Balkan. However, the fossil evidence of the species' prehistoric presence in these apparent refugia is extremely fragmentary, contributing to the ongoing confusion about the species' true range. Pleistocene fallow deer were larger, extant populations have evolved into smaller animals. Humans began to expand the distribution of this deer in the last two millennia by introducing it throughout Europe and further afield. In the Levant, fallow deer were an important source of meat in Palaeolithic cultures (420,000–200,000 BC), as is shown by bones, also used for conserving the marrow to be eaten weeks after the kill, found in the Qesem cave, but the species appears to have disappeared from the southern Levant in the following Epipalaeolithic Natufian culture, 13,000–7,500 BC, although gazelle and especially roe deer proliferated, perhaps because of climate change (increased aridity and the decrease of wooded areas), in combination with changing land use patterns and hunting pressure. At the same time the taxon persisted in the north in the Galilee region and the north of the West Bank. Distribution Native Turkey Turkey is the only country known to have definitively natural populations of European fallow deer since the Last Glacial Maximum, but populations there (alongside those of the Persian fallow deer, which also formerly occurred in