The earliest examples I have of unused sambar stag handle slabs come from the Henckels factory which was closed in 1960. The Henckels representative in the Pacific Northwest when I was managing the cutlery store in the 1980s was a gentleman named John Allison. John had a hobby of repairing pocketknives and so when he was in the Henckels factory for a sales meeting one year they asked him if he would consider repairing ankles pocketknives for the customers in the US. They wanted to serve their customers that they had in the US even though they were no longer making their own pocketknives. They gave John everything he could put in his two-car garage in terms of parts including but not limited to; blades, liners, bolsters, pens and handle material. The handle material was everything from MOP, tortoise shell (the real stuff), wood, jigged bone and of course plenty of stag. John made a beautiful two blade Jack with tortoise shell handles that was his EDC. It was a beautiful knife!
About 10 years ago I made a deal where I received a bunch of this old Henckels stag, much of which had warped. I figured a way to straighten it at least to a certain degree but I have used most of the really nice pieces already. The pieces below are some of the small stag handles I have left and some of them are a little warped. They warped again when they dried out without being held flat by being pinned to a knife.
The thing that strikes me the most about this stag is how thin it is. I have sometimes wondered if the old Germans had some way of cutting the outer layer off the antler and then flattening it out to make a nice flat handle. I don't know that they did this, but looking at some of the saw marks on the back of these slabs makes me wonder.
These six sets of stag handles I purchased this April at the OKCA show. I purchased them from custom knife maker Ron Lake, an Oregon resident. Schrade fans should recognize his name, he is Lake of Lake & Walker. Ron was selling some of the stag he didn't think he would need anymore. He said he had purchase quite a bit of stag at least 15 years ago or longer. If I had more money with me, I would have purchased more of his stag. I would've liked to have seen what he had the first day of the show instead of the last day when I found it.
What is notable about this stag, in my mind, it is also how thin it is. It's a bit thicker than the Henckels stag but not nearly as thick as a lot of the stag that you find these days.
In the second picture here you notice there is some gray or black color on the inside of the stag. I believe this is potassium permanganate or some other type of diet that has soaked through the stag from the outside.
The last two pictures are stag that I purchased from a importer that used to sell of the Oregon show. The gentleman had some health issues but I managed to connect with his company through the Internet and bought some stag from them. Apparently some of this stock, including stag has been sitting since his illness and they were just beginning to sell it off last year.
I find this stag to be quite a bit thicker than either of the two examples above. Is this from a different species of deer, or a sub species of sambar stag? I don't know the answer to that. I know that all three batches of stag in this post were presented to me as sambar stag. I don't know any way we could tell for sure if this is sambar stag or another species. Perhaps DNA testing would answer the question, but I don't have any idea where a person would send it to be tested.
The bottom line is aside from the curiosity of a lot of us collectors, I suppose it matters really little whether this is sambar stag or antler from another species of deer. As long as it looks good and performs well as a knife handle I'm good with it, (although I do like the look of that Henckels stag and wish I had a bunch more of it especially in larger sizes!)
... I'm not a Case collector at all and don't often check that subforum.... The background regarding Case knife handles is very interesting to me - that stag is nice but still much different to me than the old vintage Sheffield knives and I wouldn't probably associate the Case Stag as Sambar based upon my own ignorance not knowing the origin - 
... one other thing as an aside and a generalization but when comparing old Sheffield vs American knives I think Sheffield used much more stag whereas American cutleries used much more jigged bone - in fact jigged bone here was much nicer than many Sheffield examples though I think Sheffield examples are not all that common - like using true stag here...
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