How would humans need to adapt to carry the weight of antlers?

Question

I have an idea for a race of humanoids inspired by deer but instead of the males, the females evolved antlers as a form of sexual selection—if a guy makes a pass at you and you don’t like him, you have massive weapons attached to your head that you can stab him with (I may or may not have watched the Barbie movie for the first time last night). I don’t want the guys to just sit around and do nothing tho, but I feel like the women would have the physical hunting advantage. Although they might often be pregnant or nursing so idk I’ll think abt it. Btw yeah they are omnivores.

I don’t know how they’d be able to carry the antlers without toppling over if they tilted their heads, because they would prob defeat the point. I’m not sure how to adapt the human body plan to it without making them feel not like humans at all when I want them to basically feel like humans with antlers

Answer 1

Frame Challenge - Considering how Humans Fight, Antlers would be a massive liability

I am going to ignore the sexual selection part (because otherwise this Frame challenge would be 3 times as long - but TL;DR - it doesnt work like that, and for good reason)

I want to focus on why the premise of the question is silly. We Humans have 2 primary means of fighting:

Grappling and Striking - and in both of these scenarios, Antlers would be a disadvantage.

Striking: We have a big weakness to getting hit in the head - a good strike on the button (that part just along the jawline) can render someone unconscious. Thus one of the first things an Amateur boxer or any determined Martial Artist has to learn is head movement.... Which would be exceedingly hampered by a pair of Antlers, even if we assume everyone has F1 Driver style neck strength or double or triple that - the extra mass of the antlers is still going to mean that head movement is slow and it is telegraphed (the ends of the antlers will exagerate and make small head movements obvious)

Grappling: You have just given an assailant a 1 metre lever to apply torque to the Neck. This is a bad idea. There are videos online of Deer running, tripping, getting their Antlers stuck and through the momentum, snapping their own necks and dying. Furthermore - Antlers would not provide a suitable deterrent to anyone trying to do some form of Submission (e.g. a rear naked choke) - it would also mean things like head locks are much harder to escape - because the antlers would get caught.

Finally - we have to consider the position of the Antlers relative to our Eyes.

We Humans are predators - our eyes are both facing forward, this helps us gauge distance for things like stalking prey, chasing prey and throwing things. If we lower our head (to hypothetically gore someone with our hypothetical antlers) we cannot see where we are going and we lose most of our forward vision.

Compare to a Deer that has eyes on the sides of their head and positioned such that when it lowers its head - it can still see forward (it shares this with Horses and other animals).

For reference - here is a series of pictures of a Man wrestling a Deer (after said man pissed the Deer off): Whilst you can see the Deer wins, notice the pictures where the man has twisted the Deers neck around

In short - Antlers making dodging headshots (punches and Kicks) harder, it gives a skilled assailant something to grab and twist and with our eye position, it makes keeping vision on who you are attacking impossible

Answer 2

First

Thank you for not tagging this question science-based. As @TheDemonLord points out, there's a lot of problems with the idea of a bipedal antler-bearing creature.

Second

On the other hand, the evolution tag is a problem. For antler-bearing primates to evolve to bipedal humanity would require the horns to shrink. Evolution favors problem-solving and intellect. As the number of problems grow (like running through a thick forest on two legs) and the intelligence grows (like learning how to hide in the thick forest) evolution would favor generations that treated the antlers as liabilities (which they would be).

As an example, the primates in humanity's distant evolutionary past once had tails. We still have some vestiges of those tails, but we lost them about 25 million years ago. As their importance to actually living life decreased their need decreased and so they decreased — and were eventually lost. From a realistic evolutionary perspective, your human females with antlers wouldn't exist other than a slight thickening (perhaps) of the bone on the left-top and right-top of the head reminding us they were once there.

BTW: I've been chastised by people for even suggesting that humans can occasionally sport a vestigial tail. It's because they're so rare. But if you're thinking something along the lines of a donkey's tail, you're not understanding what it is.

But, back to the point, TV shows like Sweet Tooth are fantasy for a reason. From any science-based perspective, antlers on a bipedal, intelligent species aren't realistic.

But let's throw all that to the wind and just answer the question!

OK! You want a humanoid creature sporting a beautiful 5-point rack! We're going to ignore what this would do to architecture (like doors) and we're going to ignore how such a creature would sleep (probably in a chair with a special table to rest the head on). Our beautiful female is strutting confidently down the street! How?

First of all, the skull would have pedicles. This is a structure on the skull to which antlers are attached.

Image courtesy Jake's Bones

Now, I can't prove it, but a bit of logic suggests that the extended snout/jaw of antler-bearing species helps balance those lovely horns, so while I think you can believably ignore it, realistically your females would have something of an extended jawline. We'll ignore this. I'll lose sleep if I spend too much time thinking about Thylane Blondeau with a dog's snout.

Unfortunately, I'm having trouble finding specific links to rationalize what I'm about to explain: spines. It's easy to point out that you'll need stronger neck muscles to handle the added weight and the added inertia of the head, but evolution would believably create a spine structure between skull and shoulders and enhancements to the shoulders that would forbid the head from turning or nodding to any great degree. In other words, your females lose the ability to look coyishly over their shoulders. Either that, or a much harder to rationalize change in the nervous system that prohibits fast head movements. Wouldn't want to break our own necks, right? The overall effect might be only a small increase in neck bulk (a bit for the bones designed to prohibit great turning or nodding, more for the added muscles), but it's believable not too much more. The bigger change would be the bulkier shoulder structure to handle the weight, attach the neck spine, and allow for attachment of the stronger muscles, ligaments, etc.

So, possibly a slender neck at the base of the skull (maybe, the more I think about it...) but a bulkier neck and shoulder structure.

Alternative: Ossicones

You could drop the antlers and go with ossicones, which would require far less physiological change. Ossicones are the structures on the skull of Giraffes. Much less dramatic, but much more practical. No longer do we need to solve pesky problems with architecture and sleeping.

Image courtesy Wikipedia

And I shudder to think of what it would feel like for a lady to give me the ossicone version of an upper-cut.

One last thing...

I've ignored eye placement. I think you can believably ignore eye placement, but realistically the eye sockets would need to be either forward of the pedicles/ossicones or below them. You could rotate the pedicles so the forward tip of each pedicle met just over the nasal structure, allowing the eyes to basically be where we expect them today. The added bone (which you don't see in the deer image, above) would be needed to support the antlers since the energy can't be distributed symmetrically to the skull anymore (I suspect that's the reason why antler-bearing animal eye sockets ended up where they did).

Such a change would produce substantial bone structure (compared to actual humans) along the eyebrow line (which would likely rotate a bit). Might make the ladies look a bit like Klingons... but like I say, I think you can believably walk away from this one.

Unless you want that look.