I Have Two Pieces of News for You

The first: the European fallow deer bears the Latin binomial name Dama dama. And this Dama has nothing whatever to do with the word dame, "woman". Dama was used in ancient Rome for small hoofed animals that grew easily accustomed to people, and is thought to go back to the Proto-Indo-European root demh, that is, "to tame" or "to domesticate". The dame, though not the doe, that you first thought of comes from the Latin word domina, "mistress", which in turn goes back to an ancestor shared with "to tame", the root *dem- / *dom-, properly "house".

And now the second piece of news. It has emerged that the European fallow deer, to whose genus and species alike Carl Linnaeus assigned the epithet dama, making it the type species of the genus, suffered a sharp fall in genetic diversity in the time that has passed since the last interglacial, that is, from roughly 130,000 to 115,000 years ago. This conclusion was reached by researchers from the Universities of Potsdam and Leiden, who analysed DNA from fossils 120,000 years old.

The material comes from Neumark-Nord, a fossil biotope near Merseburg in Saxony-Anhalt. The lake sediments of this site preserved the DNA of an animal of warm climates, which is a rarity in itself: genetic material usually survives better from cold conditions, and samples of interglacial fauna are hard to obtain. In the warm interglacial periods the fallow deer was widespread in Central Europe, and with the onset of cold it retreated southwards. The analysis showed that a single ancient population of fallow deer carried genetic diversity comparable to that of the entire present-day Eurasian range of the species. Modern fallow deer preserve only a part of it: the diversity has shrunk markedly, probably owing to extinctions in the glacial periods and the subsequent effects of climate and of man.

So, dames of the dama, do not swish your behinds: you are not genetically diverse.