When Wolves once roamed the Scottish Highlands: A 2000 year old preserved paw belonging to highland wolf unearthed in a peat bog.

by Creative_Recover

13 comments

  1. Wolves were said to have roamed the Scottish highlands – their last remaining stronghold in the UK – until the 1700s, when a man called Polson claimed to have shot the last surviving wolf. This particular paw was discovered in 2018 and was unearthed by a mechanical digger: [https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/remains-of-ancient-wolf-found-in-highland-peat-bog-281417](https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/remains-of-ancient-wolf-found-in-highland-peat-bog-281417)

    The eerie howl of wolves at night ( [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifGDsYTbMoc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifGDsYTbMoc) ) would have once been a regular feature of the highlands for many millenia.

  2. Poor fella has been limping around on three paws for 2000 years

  4. That looks like a skull? Either way not great that they were cutting peat…

  7. I make a podcast called Stories of Scotland and we researched this skull when we made an episode about wolves. I noticed that there was a lot of media about the body when it was found, however not any recent updates. 

    So I contacted the museum where it was deposited and they responded that the visual ID of the skull and analysis of tissue and bone samples suggests that the “potential wolf” is  most likely a dog, although there are some skeletal anomalies. Carbon dating has dated it as approximately 150 years old- which is long after wolves were extinct in Scotland. 

    The episode is here if you want to listen:[ https://www.storiesofscotland.com/podcast/2023/9/4/wolves](https://www.storiesofscotland.com/podcast/2023/9/4/wolves)

  9. I really hope we see the wolves come back in my lifetime

  10. Did it have a date of death, certificate? 2000 years old? How do they know 😂😂😂

  11. Wolves were not a constant feature in Scotlands prehistory as there were points during the last Ice Age where the temperatures dropped so low was that pretty much all mammal species (including human beings) were driven out of Scotland. But during milder periods wolves were always very quick to re-populate the lands as they followed the herds of deer which grazed upon the grasslands & heathes that replaced the retreating glacial ice.

    The reason why Scotland (and in particular, Sutherland) became the highland wolf’s last stronghold was because of the vast forests that used to stretch across many parts combined with the large amounts of deer and low human population density. But as the numbers of humans rose, people came into direct conflict with wolves more because the wolves would attack people, eat their livestock, hunt the deer (which people also wanted to hunt) or even dig up the graves of the recently dead to feast upon their corpses. This then prompted the sport of wolf hunting to become very popular, which was enjoyed by both the Scottish nobility and the common folk, with even Queen Mary herself attending a wolf hunt in 1563 that saw 5 wolves killed and 360 deer slaughtered.

    Nobody saw persecuting wolves as a bad thing back then because people did not understand ecosystems very well and could only see the bad things things that wolves did (like decimating sheep or eating peoples children) and so anytime a wolf was killed the event was celebrated. According to historical accounts, large areas of woodland in Perthshire, Lochaber and Argyll were also deliberately destroyed to deprive wolves of their natural habitat and in Sutherland people took to burying their dead on the isle of Handa to preserve the resting places and protect them from being dug up by wolves.

    In the end, the story goes that an old hunter called Polson killed the last wolf in Sutherland in 1700, which a carved stone now sites at side of the A9 to mark the spot where the wolf died. However, there is a lot of debate over when exactly the last wolf was killed because official records indicate that the last Scottish wolf was killed by Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel in 1680 in Killiecrankie (Perthshire), whilst others believe a wolf was killed near Findhorn in Moray in 1743 following claims it had killed two children. Rumoured sightings of wolves also continued until as recently as 1888 (though none of these sightings were proven), though it is certain that wolves have been extinct for well over a century now.

    Because of the myriad benefits that have been observed of reintroducing wolves to area’s like Yellowstone National Park in America, there have been calls to introduce a pack of wolves to Scotland (i.e. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/08/wolves-scotland-reintroduction-lister-alladale ). But for various reasons, (so far) all of these attempts reintroduce wolves to Scotland have been batted back.

  13. I’m no archeologist but that paw looks like a skull.

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