December 11, 2014 • 36 mins
Why do deer and moose boast antlers? How does this material grow faster than any living vertebrate bones on Earth? You'd think we'd know the answers to these questions, but antlers remain far more mysterious than we often realize. Join Robert and Julie as they discuss the science of antlers and how these weapons factor into ancient human history, global myth cycles and professional athlete urine samples.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Julie Douglas.
Now Julie. I grew up in the American South, so
I have all these memories of rural individuals with their
(00:25):
trucks and one of it's not your banjos, but often
like would be and they're often rifles in the back
of the of the truck in the window where you
can see it. Uh, you know, big mudded up trucks
and uh. And there would be certain you know, iconography
that would go on the truck. Um. Sometimes it would
be a beloved cartoon character um urinating onto onto a
(00:49):
rival truck manufacturers logo, but oftentimes it was an image
of a deer because naturally, deer hunting was really big
in the area continues to be really big UM and
rural areas throughout the United States, doing no small part
to the fact that we've disrupted the predator prey relationship
and the environment. And you have way too many deer
(01:09):
and they have to have to be cold, and so
you turn to hunters and allow them to go out
there and call the deer. And if you're a manly
man in the American South, you're going to want to
show your hunting prowess by featuring those antlers wherever you can, right, Oh, yes,
so on on the wall, on the vehicle, um, just yeah,
(01:30):
just about anywhere. On Just the iconography of the h
of the antlers just ends up just about everywhere. And
it's by no means purely a fascination of the American South,
or even American culture or even modern culture. That's one
of the really fascinating things about about deer and antler
motifs is that when you you look at them and
you start looking back through history, they go back pretty
(01:52):
much all the way. They go back to at least
thirty thousand uh BC and UH and you see myth
cycles around the world involved because deer and uh and
deer like creatures, your moose, your caribou, you reindeer, um, etcetera.
These uh these creatures are found around the world, particularly
(02:12):
in the northern hemisphere, and they become the associations are
really potent, right, very powerful. And in fact, there is
uh something called the carno nos, which is Celtic for
the horned god. You find that in Celtic mythology, and
he is connected with male animals, particularly the stag and
rut to give you an idea, which has led him
(02:34):
to be associated with fertility and vegetation. So you've got
this sort of wild god of the forest creature who's
decked out in these huge antlers. And what I like
about this example in mythology is that just really kind
of carry with it, uh, not just the folklore tradition,
(02:54):
but the sort of magical thinking that one can assume
with this image. And I stumbled upon this bit of
this seventeenth century samurai named Honda Tata Katsu who would
literally do this sort of embodied cognition with antlers fastened
(03:17):
onto his helmet when he went onto the battlefield to
to intimidate, to really try to embody this idea of
this this uh you know, in this sense a warlike
creature doing battle. Now, that's that can be a bit dangerous,
as I'll get to in a second, because you can
you can potentially turn into a deer. That's one of
(03:37):
the big risks. And yeah, and we've seen this in
Japanese the samurai re enactments. Kid. Now you mentioned the
masculine dear antlerd deity there, but that doesn't mean that
that all deer entities are necessarily masculine. Um. In the
Dear Goddess of Ancient Siberia, Esther Jacobson argues that the
(04:00):
deer is rooted in a symbolic system revolving around an
animal mother. Uh So in this myth cycle, the dear
mother is is kind of like a tree of life
and the source of life and death. And uh, there's
a there's a fabulous a little article titled the Deer
as a symbol by psychologist Thomas R. Hirsch, and I'll
make sure to link to that on the podcast landing
page accompanying this episode. But he argues that the when
(04:23):
the deer is symbolizes a female goddess, it's it's definitely
from a male point of view, and it gets into
the male psychology not only of like sort of gender politics,
of of of of human breeding, but also the hunt.
And uh, in a certain amount of guilt regarding the hunt.
He says, quote perhaps six the deer tales I've read
(04:44):
concerned the elusiveness of the deer in the hunt and
therefore expressed the psychology of male hunters. The hunter chases
a fast and elusive deer deeper and deeper into unknown
areas of the vast forest, into some strange world. And
he goes on to identify five key mo'keefe in dear
mythology and surprising uh and this will this will come
out more as we discuss antlers in the science and antlers.
(05:06):
But he found a little thin nothing in the way
of myths that we're dealing with the cyclical shedding of antlers. Now,
if any listeners out there have some examples of that
they would like to bring to mind, send them our way,
because I'd love to I love to read them. But anyway,
Hurst points out the following you have antlers is protection,
So you hang them on the wall, you wear them
in the battle, you put them over the door. There
(05:26):
you know, I'm a magical symbol to protect you. The
second is a deer is a victim or a persecuted animal.
I think that's that's very obvious due to our hunting
of the deer. Uh. Then there's deer as riches or wealth,
which is uh is key to any kind of hunting
culture where you kill a deer and then you can
feature family you can. You can use every part of
the deer in many of these traditions to to provide
(05:48):
for a family or a community. Uh. And then there's
guilt over the hunt. And this is this is really
interesting because he mentions a few different stories. For instance,
that there's a Pueblo story in which the deer, elk, antelope,
and eagle were all originally man eating monsters, and the
gods punished them by making them human food. So it
kind of gives us an owl like like, should I
(06:10):
feel bad about killing and eating the deer, No, because
that deer used to be really awful and the gods
are punishing it, so it's cool. A similar one you'll
find in the Siberian traditions, which say that the elk
once had six legs and lived in the sky, and
it got so conceded that the god knew me had
its two back legs could cut off and then threw
it down to earth and then then it's okay to
(06:31):
eat it. And uh. You see various tales of this kind.
Other ones include um ideas that the deer is born
again after you kill it, or the deer grants the
hunter permission to kill it, which again all comes back
this guilt idea of right and these these sort of
very difficult negotiations we make psychologically when we talk about
(06:53):
our food sources, which we've talked about before in the book.
Some we love, some we hate, some we eat. We
did a podcast of episode called Don't Eat the Panda,
and I'll include a link to that on the landing
page for this episode, but if you want to go back,
listen to that, because we get really deep into these
discussions of how we feel about the animals we consume
in the semantic distancing with words. Yes. Finally, the motif,
(07:16):
the final motif that he points out deer as a
guide to another world. Now, dear uh, if you've encountered them,
you can attest to this. They're elusive, their light footed,
their speedy. They flee into the deep forest and if
you're hunting them, this could draw you in after them,
into deeper woods, into areas that resonate with supernatural ideas.
So you have, like the dear people of Scottish myth,
(07:37):
you have various accounts where where deer or take the
form of alluring women and they're kind of like sirens
leading you onto destruction. Um, and then we have multiple
tales where you have to deal with the danger of
becoming a deer. Uh. There's a story of a fourth
century Chinese hunter who fell and became a stag and
then ran away and his son gave up hunting. In
(07:57):
European myth cycles, here's the character brutal And who was
turned into a row or a little stag because he
drank from a forbidden pool. You have animal transformations throughout
the Native American tribes people's belief systems of parts of
rituals where where you're donning the hides of deer using
antlers of deer uh, and you run the risk of
(08:19):
catching deer fever, in which the hunter becomes a deer
and flees into the forest and never comes back again. Um.
And one of my my favorites, and I have a
blog post about this is gonna come out because you
see it as a motif. In art, you have the
Greek counter Assetian who comes upon the goddess Diana bathing
naked in a pool, and so she's this is of
course a dangerous thing to do to glimpse, say a
(08:40):
god or goddess naked, and so she's furious and she
turns him into a stag um so that he can
never tell anybody about what he saw. So then he
runs off and he's torn apart by his own hunting dogs.
He's unable to stop him because by turning him into
a deer, she took away his voice, so he couldn't
tell anybody about seeing her naked. But he also couldn't
call his own dogs. I'm familiar with that, just from
(09:03):
an episode of Duck Dynasty. They were just sitting around
talking about all this. Now I wish they were That
was well, there, they're duck people, so they probably have
a whole different set of legends about potentially turning into
the but they were right. But they're hunters at the core.
So if they're duck people, they're dear people. Now. One
of the things I was thinking about too is pan
with his flute leading people away, you know, the horned
(09:26):
pan um. So you know, we all have some sort
of familiarity with this trope of deer and antlers in
this sort of mystical creature. And if you think that
this isn't translated into some sort of industrial complex, well
you're wrong, because it turns out that antlers are a huge,
the huge commodity. New Zealand is the world largest producer
(09:49):
of deer antler, followed closely by Australia and Canada, both
increasingly UH more so and Korea is probably the world's
largest user of antlers, with with an appetite for all
sorts of things antler anity. We've been using antlers for
for ages and ages because essentially you have if you
catch them in time, you have this hardened bone structure
(10:13):
that is sharpened, that's smooth, and I seem to lend
itself well to use. And indeed, Uh, there was a
five hundred thousand year old antler hammer found at eartham
pit in Box Grove, England, and this would have been
used by an extinct species of Homo Heidelbergness, the first
humans to colonize Europe. And then UH also of interest
(10:33):
to two thousand ten an excavation in Motala, Sweden, a
card bone was on earth at a Mesolithic site that's
rich in ancient artifacts from about four thousand and six
thousand BC. And UH, what what they found was. You know,
it could have been just a mere tool with a
with a phallic um theme to it, but one inn
(10:54):
definitely looks like a penis, and so there are there's
some discussions that it could have been the world's first
known sex toy. So yeah. According to Clara Moskovits writing
for Live Science, the dildol like object is about four
inches that's ten point five centimeters long and about point
(11:14):
eight inches in diameter two centimeters and uh, if you
look at the picture, it's sort of it's very uncanny. Yeah, yeah,
it's pretty unmistakable, and they point out it would be
it would have been unmistakable at the time. It's not
like somebody made this tool and then other people, there's
other tribes people just snakered at him at the accidental resemblance,
(11:36):
so right, And some people say, well, maybe it was
just something that was a symbolic used in fertility rights
or something not necessarily used as a sex aid, but
we'll probably never know. Yeah, I mean, needless to say,
a phallic motifs are found just about everywhere you look,
and they've been there throughout human history and even perhaps
before human history. So it uh, it doesn't take a
(11:58):
huge stretch of the imagination to uh to think about
it in that light. Now, Um, it's it's interesting to note. Um,
and this was pointed out in the nineteen three edition
of Nature that the anthropologist, when studying excavated bone remains,
often finds it difficult to distinguish specimens worked by hominids
and uh those that have been say, nod on by
(12:19):
carnivores hungry rodents, but also herbivores such as a northern
north such as a Norwegian reindeer or the Scottish red
deer um. According to a then anthropologist at the British Museum,
these nod bones and antlers can resemble artifacts worked by
human hands and have sometimes been mistaken for them. So
even as we've used antlers in our construction of tools
(12:43):
since time out of mind, it's easy to make the
mistake uh by looking at nod remnants and think that
those were worked by human hands. All right, with all
that being said, let's look at the basics of antlers,
because it's pretty amazing. Um. They are found on the
heads of all members of the deer family, with the
exception of reindeers, in which female rengeers also have a
(13:06):
set of antlers. They're made of bone, and they sprout
from the pedicle, which is a bony growth located just
above the skull. Yeah, and it's worth worth stressing again
that these are there is a genuine bone we're talking
here about here, antalope, sheep, goats, creatures of this nature.
They have horns rather than antlers. And the difference here
is that horns are made of keratin, the material you're
(13:30):
finding your fingernails or and hair and claws and uh.
And they're not routinely shed in this manner. Yeah. Right,
if you have a horn, if you're sporting a horn
and it breaks off, too bad, it's not gonna grow back.
But if you have antlers, they will grow back. And
we'll discuss a little bit more about that. Hardened antlers
are made up of roughly protein, calcium, even phosphorus and
(13:52):
one percent that they also contain magnesium, sodium, aluminium, potassium, copper, manganese,
and zinc. And the chemical composition of antlers varies with
the location and can be affected by venal environmental factors
like soil characteristics and the amount of rainfall during the
antler growth cycle. And that's what I think is so
cool about these antlers, is they really respond to the environment. Yeah, Genetics, age,
(14:16):
and diet or are the three key factors in in
antler growth. And UH and yeah, we've scientists have spent
a lot of time just trying to figure out exactly,
you know, how how everything comes together in the formation
of these antlers, indeed, what the antlers are for, what
purpose they have, why in most most species the males
have antlers and females don't. And then in the case
(14:37):
of reindeer and caribou, one of the females and antlers.
That throws off a lot of the theories and you
have to to to to reanalyze the situation. Now. One
of the most outstanding examples of antlers is the Irish elk.
It's known as the giant deer Megleserus gigantis. Of course
it's extinct now, but analysis of its bones and chief
(15:00):
by scientists UH who are based in Britain and Russia,
showed the huge herbivore survived until about five thousand BC.
It stood about seven ft tall two point one meters
at the shoulder, and the adult males had massive antlers
that spanned about twelve ft across that three point seven meters,
(15:22):
and they weighed up to eight eight pounds or forty kilos.
That's quite a rack. Nice I was wondering if that
would get worked in, So what would be the purpose
of having such a huge rack? Well, that's that's one
of the questions. That's that that we've we've struggled with
over time. What why did we actually wanted to actually
have these antlers? And there are actually several key theories
(15:45):
that have been thrown around uh and and a lot
of them are kind of related. And some of the
additional theories kind of use one or two of these
uh in in making their final argument. And there's no
definitive answer here we should say, yeah, which is kind
of surprising. It's it's easy to take for granted that antlers,
surely we know why they work, and it's at a
surface level, it's easy to to just go along with
(16:07):
it with any one of these these theories. But the
first one signal of male quality. So this one, of course,
just comes down to breeding, just comes down to acquiring
a mate, sending a message to a potential mate, Hey,
look at me, I'm healthy, I got the genetics. I
am clearly the deer or moose or what have you
that you should mate with. So yeah, I mean this
(16:28):
is basically transmitting like I have a really healthy diet,
I spent a lot of time out in the sun,
not playing video games. You should choose me. Now. Another
theory is that these are weapons used to fight other
males and uh. And it's kind of funny for this
as a theory, since we do see plenty of deer
uh in some animals fighting with each other with their antlers.
(16:50):
But the idea here is that breeding season starts, mail
deer need to use their antlers to fight and established
dominance with other males. And indeed, they, like I said,
they do use them for this purpose. Yeah, and some
of them don't even engage in combat. So the idea
here is that a glorious display of antlers maybe enough
for another deer to stand down. So yeah, I mean
(17:10):
they may spar and if they do, well, hey, it
kind of shows like that one is the dominant one
and they should stand down. Or maybe they just look
at each other and say, I forget it. So it's
essentially your your classic that's not a knife. This is
a nice scenario, or is I like to think of
you just referenced crocodile Dundee, But I like to think
of Richards lost Ark when Harrison ford Is is met
(17:33):
with an oggressor with a knife and then he just
pulls out a gun just like forget it. Yeah, the
guy like pulls out this big knife or almost like
a scimitar or something, swirling it around this impressive display,
and then uh Ford just shoots him and makes short
work of Yeah. Um. Now, another theory is that this
is a display dominance side and this kind of ties
into what we've already discussed the size of the antlers
(17:53):
of the deer displays age related dominance between males without
the males actually having to fight, So we touched on
that already. And then another theories defense against predators. And
this is the basic idea that you grow those antlers
um as much or if not exclusively, because you have
to defend yourself against predators. You as as an antler
bearing species, you are a prey animal and things are
(18:15):
out to get you. So it's easier to think of
these antlers is essentially like the big, gaudy gold watch
that an individual is wearing at the beach, and that
sends the message, hey, I got plenty of resources. I'm
clearly the guy you need to hang out with and
breed with. But uh, but but then what do we do.
What do we think when we look at female reindeer,
female cariboo that are supporting antlers as well. Well, there's
(18:37):
an interesting article on this from smithsonian dot com. This
is a from from why do some females have horns?
By Gary Laden And Uh, there's been a points out
there's been a lot of of research that's gone into
this question because again it kind of becomes pivotal to
our whole question about antlers in general. Because here these
females running oud with them. What does it mean? Uh,
points out an in tiny monogamous deer and antelope populations, Uh,
(19:01):
the females and the males tend to look more alike.
There's less difference. Uh there, you know, they're pair bonded.
They have basic horns or antlers to defend against predators,
nothing fancy. Meanwhile, when you look at the larger species,
that's where you see more of this male competition U
and for the females, and you see this difference, uh,
this antler or hornet difference between the males and the females. Well,
(19:23):
so to me that uh, that gets more to the
question of sexual selection, because then you start to think
about peacocks and the male peacocks and their glorious displays
like big of the display, the more they seem like
they would be the ones to mate with, or at
least that's the idea. And particularly when you consider that
whole and logic with antlers and protection, like if that's
(19:43):
what they're there for, it doesn't make sense because then
all dear, no matter you know, if you're you're talking
about a moose or you know, a row dear, all
of them would have a set of antlers to protect
themselves with. Indeed, now, two of the theories out there
regarding why have antlers? Why have horns if you're if
(20:05):
you're a female in the species. One of these is
the hypothesis proposed by Richard Estes, who works with the
wildebeest in East Africa, and he suggests that hornet or
antler females benefit by confusing adult males as to who
the young males and the group are, So the strategy
here would be to keep the young males in the
group longer so they can grow bigger before heading out
(20:25):
on their own. Now, a more recent theory proposed by A.
Ted Stankowich of the University of Massachusetts and Tim Carrow
of the University of California. Davis argues that females can't
really hide in protective cover, and that those who must
defend a feeding territory are more likely to have horns
or antlers than those who live in a protective habitat
or don't defend a territory. So the argument here is,
(20:47):
we see females with antlers among caribou and reindeer because
they're living out in the open, out to clear visibility.
They can't just depend on running and hiding, so that
they would need those antlers in a sense for for
for action, but also just to not stand out from
the antler and protective male members of the society. Yeah.
(21:08):
I think there's just so many different factors that play
into this um and so the jury is out, but
I guess we could all probably agree that they likely
serve as both armament and ornament. Yeah, and then there
are even additional theories, like there's the theory that reindeer
all have the antlers because they use their antlers as
tools to clear away snow when they're feeding snow plowing.
(21:30):
But then, for instance, what do you think then when
you look at the moose, because there's an argument that
in moose, the antlers may act as a large hearing aid. Um,
that makes sense because they have more of a surface area.
Makes sense. Yeah, but then why do only male moose
have those antlers because they never listen. So hopefully that
(21:51):
that relays something of the mystery surrounding the antler and
why we're still studying antlers and trying to to figure
out exactly why they evolved and how they function, uh,
for for these these different deer and deer light creatures. Indeed,
and now we're gonna take a quick break. When we
get back, we're going to talk about how antlers are
exquisitely sensitive to their environment. All right, we're back. Uh,
(22:20):
we're discussing antlers. We've talked about antlers and their their
their cultural impact on humans, and our attempts to understand
them and their their owners from sort of a supernatural standpoint.
We've talked about our scientific attempts to understand what antlers
are and why they form and what function they serve.
Now we're going to discuss the role that the environment
(22:42):
plays in the formation of antlers and and indeed the
the cyclical nature of antler growth and shedding. Which is
all dependent on the amount of light that they are
exposed to. And uh, I'm really enjoying the fact that
this is coming up again because we've been talking about
light and dark and how it so much the underpinnings
of each species existence. Well, here again is another great example,
(23:06):
because there's something called the photo period, and what we're
talking about is an interval in a twenty four hour
period during which a plant or an animal is exposed
to light. And of course periods of sunlight alter during
the course of the year. It's seasonally dependent. And uh,
and there's a seasonal cycle to what the deer a
doing to their breeding cycle, and and and as we've discussed,
most of the theories with the antlers seem to revolve
(23:28):
around the use of antlers as a as a display,
as a as as a weapon in the acquiring of
of mates. So if you look at these this photo period,
then you know it's pretty obvious that in the summer,
you have longer days, you have more sunlight, and bucks
produce higher levels of testosterone, which in turn trigger antler developments.
(23:48):
So antlers start as cartilage growing from bass. The spaces
that we called out earlier called pedicles and a fuzzy
skin known as velvet, which is really rich in blood
vessels in its sense of to the touch, it supplies
the growing antlers with essential nutrients. Now I'm not going
to call it an umbilical cord, but it's doing the
same sort of job here essentially. Yeah, just as a
(24:09):
side note to touch on the testesterone issue, you have
a deer is castrated, either on purpose or just by
accident in the course of its life, it will stop
this cycle of growth. It will grow one pair of
misshapen antlers and then keep those for the rest of
its life. Now, if it's not castrated, which out in
the wild, assuming that's not going to happen, And as
the amount of daylight dwindles later in summer, the bucks
(24:32):
go through another testosterone increase and that triggers a mineralization
and hardening of the antlers. And then you get into
fall and you have the bucks rubbing their antlers on
vegetation to remove the velvet, and that reveals these bony antlers,
and that carries them through fall in winter, and then
(24:52):
after the breeding season you have a drop in a
bucks to suster and level, and that triggers the antlers
to release from the pedicles, and then within days you
have a formation of a scab like material over those pedicles,
and the process starts anew with the development of these
new growth cells for the antlers. So obviously, if you're
(25:14):
going to go out in the woods and look for antlers,
winter is the time to do it because shed antlers
are often difficult to find really because they have this
high protein content and in abundance of calcium phosphate, so
rodents are quick to consume them. So if you do
find antlers in the wild, uh, you know, snatch them
up and consider yourself lucky. Or if you're a rodent, uh,
(25:34):
you know, half a bike. Although do you consider that
it is someone's habitat right that rodents like what it end? Yeah,
you are interfering with the habitat, I take. But then
you can argue that while we already unbalanced the habitats,
so there should be plenty of antlers out there, so
maybe we're just doing our part to keep that the
rodent skin. I don't know, I don't know. Now, the
significance of the photo period is really huge, and controlled
(25:55):
lab experiments, bucks have been capable of producing multiple sets
of antlers in a single year, as well as retaining
a single set of antlers for several years just by
altering the amount of light that they're exposed to. Wow,
see that that's good information because I found myself wondering
when I was reading about this, was like, what have
you took a deer from North America? You put it
on a plane, booked at a flight all the way
(26:17):
to Australia. What happens? You know, because you're shifting the seasons,
you're shifting light, and obviously, yeah, you change the amount
of light the deer is getting. You end up hacking
into that antler antler cycle. So there you go. Indeed,
now I do want to point out that antler is bone,
but it is particularly tough bone because obviously our own
bones break when they encounter a lot of force. And
(26:39):
when you see two moose or cariboo or or deer
going at it with their antlers, Uh, it's it's almost
kind of shocking that you're not seeing antler's just splinter
and break all over the place. Well, there's a two
thousand and nine study from John Curry at the University
of York in the UK, and uh, he was looking
at the structure of the antlers, how you know how
much uh wear and tear they can take. And he
(27:01):
found that hardened antlers, that's the the antlers that they
have in fall for the breeding season, um that they
are two point four times tougher than normal wet bone.
And he also found that they could survive impacts six
times greater than the than impacts that shatter a wet femur.
That's why this tamurai warrior bore them on it on
(27:23):
his helmet, right, Yeah, just one more reason to embody
that creature and whist and risk dear madness before you
go into battle. Now, speaking of Eastern traditions, with antlers,
you can do more than just wear them on your helmet.
You can, of course grind them up and uh and
(27:45):
use them in your medicine. Dear antler has been a
common ingredient in Chinese tonic preparations for some time, dating
back at least two thousand years, and in Chinese traditional
medicine is thought to nourish the en, tonify the kidney,
invigorate the spleen, strengthened bones and muscles, and promote blood flow,
and it's still used in inter Chinese traditional medicine today
to treat a number of ailments including memory, hyperplasia, malignant sores,
(28:08):
children's moms, etcetera. Now in the West, UM, some researchers
are are very interested in the antlers because of the
rapid growth of antlers. So at the height we're talking
about an eighth of an inch a day, which is
pretty incredible. So they're interested because they're thinking about this
sort of regenerative properties that the cells possessed. They're also
(28:30):
looking to antlers as treatments for maladies like osteo arthritis. Yeah.
In fact, that two thousand twelve study from the University
of Casilla la Mancha in Spain UH suggests that the
origin of osteoporosis could be directly linked to a lack
of minerals essential to calcium absorption, namely magnanese, rather than
(28:50):
a lack of calcium. And this is all based on
their studies of antlers. And this is because the previous
antler studies have shown that magnese is necessary for calcium absorption.
So this hypothesis cell bowls around the idea that when
the human body is of less manganese or when it
is sent from the skeleton to other organs that require it,
such as the brain. The calcium that's extracted at the
(29:10):
same time is then not probably absorbed and is excreted
in the urine, which is really important, right because a
lot of people who are trying to avoid osteoporosis are
trying to really take a lot of calcium supplements or
added to their diet with foods. But if you don't
have the manganese to help facilitate absorption, well then it
doesn't matter, right. Yeah, any kind of study that is
(29:32):
looking into the formation of bone or the the weakening
of bone, uh and antlers provide a very interesting and
very extreme model to study. Now, a team of researchers
in this Little Korea reported finding evidence that deer antlers
contain multipotent stem cells that could be useful for tissue
(29:53):
regeneration in veterinary medicine. UM. They specifically noted that injury
to wild animals, including deer themselves, could be treated using
deer antler derived cells, and they pointed out that studies
involving the use of horse stem cells have found clinical
application of equ wine derived stem cells, So, in other words,
perhaps this could make its way to humans as well.
(30:16):
Speaking of consumption by humans, um, some of you may
be familiar with a deer velvet uh, the common name
of a product made from growing antlers of deer during
that stage when they're covered in that soft velvety substance
we were discussing earlier, and you will find it in
a number of non f d A approved and the
varying degrees of suspicious products to to help you, help
(30:40):
you heal after an injury, to help you in your training, etcetera. Yeah,
dear velvet contains a growth hormone called insulin like grip
factor one or i g F one, and as you say,
it's an unproven performance enhanced are often used by athletes
who think that it could help heal cartilage and tendant
injuries more quickly and boo their strength and endurance. Yeah,
(31:02):
it's a it's a growth hormone, and these can be
useful for you know, for instance, young people that have
you know, stunted growth. It can be people who suffer
from dwarf is UM related to factors of that are
and even in the healing of cartilage and intended injuries.
But it's generally not something that gets recommended for people
who are just training and wanting to bulk up, because
(31:24):
there can be a number of adverse side effects, including
the tendons becoming too tight and uh and and easy
to break. Or it can even disrupt the way that
the body metabolizes fats and sugar. So it can it
can throw things out of whack. Indeed, it can. So
don't don't take that dear Antler supplement. It's just I mean,
you're trying to hack into your own body and do
(31:45):
That's just not a good idea. Um. Now, recently a
hunter in Slovenia brought down a row deer with what
appeared to be a unicorn horn, a single horn, a
single uh and their like formation atop its head. Instead
it to and in a way like the unicorn is
is is very much in that that area of the
(32:07):
mystical deer, you know, it's the mystical forest animal that's
it's holy and elusive and uh and so well you've
seen that Tom Cruise documentary legend, right, yes, yeah, I
was just thinking about that the the other day when
when I saw this this article, Because there's a whole
goblins are hunting the unicorn for the devil, you know,
your typical goblin, devil, unicorn plot um. But in this case,
(32:33):
this was not an actually unicorn. This was again a
deer with two outhers that were grown together. Uh And
and this was just a really rare form of antler deformity.
But that there are a number of antler deformities that
can take place due to injury to the pedical um,
injury to the animal itself, dietary genetic aspects, castration that
we mentioned earlier, So you do see a lot of
(32:56):
malformation of antlers out there in the deer moves, heraboo
reindeer populations, and this just was an extreme example of that.
It was because the pedicles grew together, so it appeared
to be just like a single unicorn like protrusion. I
thought it was interesting with the article that we're looking at.
They pointed out that the hunter probably was not able
(33:17):
to identify it as having a single um antler as
opposed to to before he shot it, because instantly people
would say, why did you kill the unicorn? Why not?
Why not bring this in? And indeed he might have
been the kicking himself because you could have taken this
thing on the road, right And then he came up
with some sort of folkloric rationalization for it. Right, it
made me follow it into the forest. There you go
(33:40):
into the deeper woods and you have no choice but
to kill it lest it draw you in. And you
see a naked goddess and then you turned into a
deer and eaten by hounds and it's all over. Yeah, psycle,
life cycle of life, all right. So there you have it,
The mystery of the antler, just a you know, a
crash course in um, the cultural importance of deer and antlers,
(34:02):
the science of of antlers. What we know? What questions
still remain? And uh, and we'd love to hear from
anyone out there who has, uh, some added bits that
they've come across, or just their own experience with the
elusive and mystical deer. Might I insert a slight diversion,
because I cannot you know how you're you're you're sitting
here thinking, and you're podcasting, and you have like the
(34:23):
one nagging thought. And I was thinking a lot of this,
These these antlers bring up again, these tropes of masculinity
and so forth. And then I thought about a picture
that a Swedish woman recently showed me that seems to
be an American thing, and which instead of like fastening
antlers to your car saying, which I've seen before, people
(34:43):
are putting what looks to be um iron castings of
testicles hanging from the front of their cards. You know
of this? Oh? Yes, are you? Are you being facetious?
I've been took a Swedish woman I know to show me.
I was like, wait, are you sure this is an
American Oh? I I almost mentioned them them earlier. I
believe they're called truck nuts, and yeah, they've they've been
(35:04):
around for a while. I think they started showing up
a few years back. And it indeed is about making
your your truck more masculine, I guess by putting testicles
on it. Um. I don't pretend to to understand it,
but it seems to be very much composed of the
same energy as as putting these protective, uh you know,
dear motifs on your Yeah. I thought, wow, like gun
(35:26):
racks aren't enough and and antlers aren't enough, that you've
gotta have truck nuts. Yeah, I mean it's it's always
seemed a little bit weird to me too, because it's
like they're exposed, right there on the truck, like even
on the human body. It's kind of kind of ridiculous.
And if you're just parking your truck at Walmart and
has it's it's testicles hanging out, you're just asking for
somebody to to kick your truck on them balls or
(35:49):
or to do something worse to the balls. I mean, yeah,
I want to weave this into some sort of vulnerability
thing like Burnet Brown's talk on vulnerability and how important
this is. So maybe it's a way of saying you
have signfortable Sometimes these are am I not, because if
they cast right your trucks, then the the antlers are
going to grow weird. AND's nicely done. You wrap that up. Okay, Um, guys,
(36:13):
if you want to find more out about us, you
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(36:36):
this and thousands of other topics. Does it House Stuff
works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Julie Douglas.
Now Julie. I grew up in the American South, so
I have all these memories of rural individuals with their
(00:25):
trucks and one of it's not your banjos, but often
like would be and they're often rifles in the back
of the of the truck in the window where you
can see it. Uh, you know, big mudded up trucks
and uh. And there would be certain you know, iconography
that would go on the truck. Um. Sometimes it would
be a beloved cartoon character um urinating onto onto a
(00:49):
rival truck manufacturers logo, but oftentimes it was an image
of a deer because naturally, deer hunting was really big
in the area continues to be really big UM and
rural areas throughout the United States, doing no small part
to the fact that we've disrupted the predator prey relationship
and the environment. And you have way too many deer
(01:09):
and they have to have to be cold, and so
you turn to hunters and allow them to go out
there and call the deer. And if you're a manly
man in the American South, you're going to want to
show your hunting prowess by featuring those antlers wherever you can, right, Oh, yes,
so on on the wall, on the vehicle, um, just yeah,
(01:30):
just about anywhere. On Just the iconography of the h
of the antlers just ends up just about everywhere. And
it's by no means purely a fascination of the American South,
or even American culture or even modern culture. That's one
of the really fascinating things about about deer and antler
motifs is that when you you look at them and
you start looking back through history, they go back pretty
(01:52):
much all the way. They go back to at least
thirty thousand uh BC and UH and you see myth
cycles around the world involved because deer and uh and
deer like creatures, your moose, your caribou, you reindeer, um, etcetera.
These uh these creatures are found around the world, particularly
(02:12):
in the northern hemisphere, and they become the associations are
really potent, right, very powerful. And in fact, there is
uh something called the carno nos, which is Celtic for
the horned god. You find that in Celtic mythology, and
he is connected with male animals, particularly the stag and
rut to give you an idea, which has led him
(02:34):
to be associated with fertility and vegetation. So you've got
this sort of wild god of the forest creature who's
decked out in these huge antlers. And what I like
about this example in mythology is that just really kind
of carry with it, uh, not just the folklore tradition,
(02:54):
but the sort of magical thinking that one can assume
with this image. And I stumbled upon this bit of
this seventeenth century samurai named Honda Tata Katsu who would
literally do this sort of embodied cognition with antlers fastened
(03:17):
onto his helmet when he went onto the battlefield to
to intimidate, to really try to embody this idea of
this this uh you know, in this sense a warlike
creature doing battle. Now, that's that can be a bit dangerous,
as I'll get to in a second, because you can
you can potentially turn into a deer. That's one of
(03:37):
the big risks. And yeah, and we've seen this in
Japanese the samurai re enactments. Kid. Now you mentioned the
masculine dear antlerd deity there, but that doesn't mean that
that all deer entities are necessarily masculine. Um. In the
Dear Goddess of Ancient Siberia, Esther Jacobson argues that the
(04:00):
deer is rooted in a symbolic system revolving around an
animal mother. Uh So in this myth cycle, the dear
mother is is kind of like a tree of life
and the source of life and death. And uh, there's
a there's a fabulous a little article titled the Deer
as a symbol by psychologist Thomas R. Hirsch, and I'll
make sure to link to that on the podcast landing
page accompanying this episode. But he argues that the when
(04:23):
the deer is symbolizes a female goddess, it's it's definitely
from a male point of view, and it gets into
the male psychology not only of like sort of gender politics,
of of of of human breeding, but also the hunt.
And uh, in a certain amount of guilt regarding the hunt.
He says, quote perhaps six the deer tales I've read
(04:44):
concerned the elusiveness of the deer in the hunt and
therefore expressed the psychology of male hunters. The hunter chases
a fast and elusive deer deeper and deeper into unknown
areas of the vast forest, into some strange world. And
he goes on to identify five key mo'keefe in dear
mythology and surprising uh and this will this will come
out more as we discuss antlers in the science and antlers.
(05:06):
But he found a little thin nothing in the way
of myths that we're dealing with the cyclical shedding of antlers. Now,
if any listeners out there have some examples of that
they would like to bring to mind, send them our way,
because I'd love to I love to read them. But anyway,
Hurst points out the following you have antlers is protection,
So you hang them on the wall, you wear them
in the battle, you put them over the door. There
(05:26):
you know, I'm a magical symbol to protect you. The
second is a deer is a victim or a persecuted animal.
I think that's that's very obvious due to our hunting
of the deer. Uh. Then there's deer as riches or wealth,
which is uh is key to any kind of hunting
culture where you kill a deer and then you can
feature family you can. You can use every part of
the deer in many of these traditions to to provide
(05:48):
for a family or a community. Uh. And then there's
guilt over the hunt. And this is this is really
interesting because he mentions a few different stories. For instance,
that there's a Pueblo story in which the deer, elk, antelope,
and eagle were all originally man eating monsters, and the
gods punished them by making them human food. So it
kind of gives us an owl like like, should I
(06:10):
feel bad about killing and eating the deer, No, because
that deer used to be really awful and the gods
are punishing it, so it's cool. A similar one you'll
find in the Siberian traditions, which say that the elk
once had six legs and lived in the sky, and
it got so conceded that the god knew me had
its two back legs could cut off and then threw
it down to earth and then then it's okay to
(06:31):
eat it. And uh. You see various tales of this kind.
Other ones include um ideas that the deer is born
again after you kill it, or the deer grants the
hunter permission to kill it, which again all comes back
this guilt idea of right and these these sort of
very difficult negotiations we make psychologically when we talk about
(06:53):
our food sources, which we've talked about before in the book.
Some we love, some we hate, some we eat. We
did a podcast of episode called Don't Eat the Panda,
and I'll include a link to that on the landing
page for this episode, but if you want to go back,
listen to that, because we get really deep into these
discussions of how we feel about the animals we consume
in the semantic distancing with words. Yes. Finally, the motif,
(07:16):
the final motif that he points out deer as a
guide to another world. Now, dear uh, if you've encountered them,
you can attest to this. They're elusive, their light footed,
their speedy. They flee into the deep forest and if
you're hunting them, this could draw you in after them,
into deeper woods, into areas that resonate with supernatural ideas.
So you have, like the dear people of Scottish myth,
(07:37):
you have various accounts where where deer or take the
form of alluring women and they're kind of like sirens
leading you onto destruction. Um, and then we have multiple
tales where you have to deal with the danger of
becoming a deer. Uh. There's a story of a fourth
century Chinese hunter who fell and became a stag and
then ran away and his son gave up hunting. In
(07:57):
European myth cycles, here's the character brutal And who was
turned into a row or a little stag because he
drank from a forbidden pool. You have animal transformations throughout
the Native American tribes people's belief systems of parts of
rituals where where you're donning the hides of deer using
antlers of deer uh, and you run the risk of
(08:19):
catching deer fever, in which the hunter becomes a deer
and flees into the forest and never comes back again. Um.
And one of my my favorites, and I have a
blog post about this is gonna come out because you
see it as a motif. In art, you have the
Greek counter Assetian who comes upon the goddess Diana bathing
naked in a pool, and so she's this is of
course a dangerous thing to do to glimpse, say a
(08:40):
god or goddess naked, and so she's furious and she
turns him into a stag um so that he can
never tell anybody about what he saw. So then he
runs off and he's torn apart by his own hunting dogs.
He's unable to stop him because by turning him into
a deer, she took away his voice, so he couldn't
tell anybody about seeing her naked. But he also couldn't
call his own dogs. I'm familiar with that, just from
(09:03):
an episode of Duck Dynasty. They were just sitting around
talking about all this. Now I wish they were That
was well, there, they're duck people, so they probably have
a whole different set of legends about potentially turning into
the but they were right. But they're hunters at the core.
So if they're duck people, they're dear people. Now. One
of the things I was thinking about too is pan
with his flute leading people away, you know, the horned
(09:26):
pan um. So you know, we all have some sort
of familiarity with this trope of deer and antlers in
this sort of mystical creature. And if you think that
this isn't translated into some sort of industrial complex, well
you're wrong, because it turns out that antlers are a huge,
the huge commodity. New Zealand is the world largest producer
(09:49):
of deer antler, followed closely by Australia and Canada, both
increasingly UH more so and Korea is probably the world's
largest user of antlers, with with an appetite for all
sorts of things antler anity. We've been using antlers for
for ages and ages because essentially you have if you
catch them in time, you have this hardened bone structure
(10:13):
that is sharpened, that's smooth, and I seem to lend
itself well to use. And indeed, Uh, there was a
five hundred thousand year old antler hammer found at eartham
pit in Box Grove, England, and this would have been
used by an extinct species of Homo Heidelbergness, the first
humans to colonize Europe. And then UH also of interest
(10:33):
to two thousand ten an excavation in Motala, Sweden, a
card bone was on earth at a Mesolithic site that's
rich in ancient artifacts from about four thousand and six
thousand BC. And UH, what what they found was. You know,
it could have been just a mere tool with a
with a phallic um theme to it, but one inn
(10:54):
definitely looks like a penis, and so there are there's
some discussions that it could have been the world's first
known sex toy. So yeah. According to Clara Moskovits writing
for Live Science, the dildol like object is about four
inches that's ten point five centimeters long and about point
(11:14):
eight inches in diameter two centimeters and uh, if you
look at the picture, it's sort of it's very uncanny. Yeah, yeah,
it's pretty unmistakable, and they point out it would be
it would have been unmistakable at the time. It's not
like somebody made this tool and then other people, there's
other tribes people just snakered at him at the accidental resemblance,
(11:36):
so right, And some people say, well, maybe it was
just something that was a symbolic used in fertility rights
or something not necessarily used as a sex aid, but
we'll probably never know. Yeah, I mean, needless to say,
a phallic motifs are found just about everywhere you look,
and they've been there throughout human history and even perhaps
before human history. So it uh, it doesn't take a
(11:58):
huge stretch of the imagination to uh to think about
it in that light. Now, Um, it's it's interesting to note. Um,
and this was pointed out in the nineteen three edition
of Nature that the anthropologist, when studying excavated bone remains,
often finds it difficult to distinguish specimens worked by hominids
and uh those that have been say, nod on by
(12:19):
carnivores hungry rodents, but also herbivores such as a northern
north such as a Norwegian reindeer or the Scottish red
deer um. According to a then anthropologist at the British Museum,
these nod bones and antlers can resemble artifacts worked by
human hands and have sometimes been mistaken for them. So
even as we've used antlers in our construction of tools
(12:43):
since time out of mind, it's easy to make the
mistake uh by looking at nod remnants and think that
those were worked by human hands. All right, with all
that being said, let's look at the basics of antlers,
because it's pretty amazing. Um. They are found on the
heads of all members of the deer family, with the
exception of reindeers, in which female rengeers also have a
(13:06):
set of antlers. They're made of bone, and they sprout
from the pedicle, which is a bony growth located just
above the skull. Yeah, and it's worth worth stressing again
that these are there is a genuine bone we're talking
here about here, antalope, sheep, goats, creatures of this nature.
They have horns rather than antlers. And the difference here
is that horns are made of keratin, the material you're
(13:30):
finding your fingernails or and hair and claws and uh.
And they're not routinely shed in this manner. Yeah. Right,
if you have a horn, if you're sporting a horn
and it breaks off, too bad, it's not gonna grow back.
But if you have antlers, they will grow back. And
we'll discuss a little bit more about that. Hardened antlers
are made up of roughly protein, calcium, even phosphorus and
(13:52):
one percent that they also contain magnesium, sodium, aluminium, potassium, copper, manganese,
and zinc. And the chemical composition of antlers varies with
the location and can be affected by venal environmental factors
like soil characteristics and the amount of rainfall during the
antler growth cycle. And that's what I think is so
cool about these antlers, is they really respond to the environment. Yeah, Genetics, age,
(14:16):
and diet or are the three key factors in in
antler growth. And UH and yeah, we've scientists have spent
a lot of time just trying to figure out exactly,
you know, how how everything comes together in the formation
of these antlers, indeed, what the antlers are for, what
purpose they have, why in most most species the males
have antlers and females don't. And then in the case
(14:37):
of reindeer and caribou, one of the females and antlers.
That throws off a lot of the theories and you
have to to to to reanalyze the situation. Now. One
of the most outstanding examples of antlers is the Irish elk.
It's known as the giant deer Megleserus gigantis. Of course
it's extinct now, but analysis of its bones and chief
(15:00):
by scientists UH who are based in Britain and Russia,
showed the huge herbivore survived until about five thousand BC.
It stood about seven ft tall two point one meters
at the shoulder, and the adult males had massive antlers
that spanned about twelve ft across that three point seven meters,
(15:22):
and they weighed up to eight eight pounds or forty kilos.
That's quite a rack. Nice I was wondering if that
would get worked in, So what would be the purpose
of having such a huge rack? Well, that's that's one
of the questions. That's that that we've we've struggled with
over time. What why did we actually wanted to actually
have these antlers? And there are actually several key theories
(15:45):
that have been thrown around uh and and a lot
of them are kind of related. And some of the
additional theories kind of use one or two of these
uh in in making their final argument. And there's no
definitive answer here we should say, yeah, which is kind
of surprising. It's it's easy to take for granted that antlers,
surely we know why they work, and it's at a
surface level, it's easy to to just go along with
(16:07):
it with any one of these these theories. But the
first one signal of male quality. So this one, of course,
just comes down to breeding, just comes down to acquiring
a mate, sending a message to a potential mate, Hey,
look at me, I'm healthy, I got the genetics. I
am clearly the deer or moose or what have you
that you should mate with. So yeah, I mean this
(16:28):
is basically transmitting like I have a really healthy diet,
I spent a lot of time out in the sun,
not playing video games. You should choose me. Now. Another
theory is that these are weapons used to fight other
males and uh. And it's kind of funny for this
as a theory, since we do see plenty of deer
uh in some animals fighting with each other with their antlers.
(16:50):
But the idea here is that breeding season starts, mail
deer need to use their antlers to fight and established
dominance with other males. And indeed, they, like I said,
they do use them for this purpose. Yeah, and some
of them don't even engage in combat. So the idea
here is that a glorious display of antlers maybe enough
for another deer to stand down. So yeah, I mean
(17:10):
they may spar and if they do, well, hey, it
kind of shows like that one is the dominant one
and they should stand down. Or maybe they just look
at each other and say, I forget it. So it's
essentially your your classic that's not a knife. This is
a nice scenario, or is I like to think of
you just referenced crocodile Dundee, But I like to think
of Richards lost Ark when Harrison ford Is is met
(17:33):
with an oggressor with a knife and then he just
pulls out a gun just like forget it. Yeah, the
guy like pulls out this big knife or almost like
a scimitar or something, swirling it around this impressive display,
and then uh Ford just shoots him and makes short
work of Yeah. Um. Now, another theory is that this
is a display dominance side and this kind of ties
into what we've already discussed the size of the antlers
(17:53):
of the deer displays age related dominance between males without
the males actually having to fight, So we touched on
that already. And then another theories defense against predators. And
this is the basic idea that you grow those antlers
um as much or if not exclusively, because you have
to defend yourself against predators. You as as an antler
bearing species, you are a prey animal and things are
(18:15):
out to get you. So it's easier to think of
these antlers is essentially like the big, gaudy gold watch
that an individual is wearing at the beach, and that
sends the message, hey, I got plenty of resources. I'm
clearly the guy you need to hang out with and
breed with. But uh, but but then what do we do.
What do we think when we look at female reindeer,
female cariboo that are supporting antlers as well. Well, there's
(18:37):
an interesting article on this from smithsonian dot com. This
is a from from why do some females have horns?
By Gary Laden And Uh, there's been a points out
there's been a lot of of research that's gone into
this question because again it kind of becomes pivotal to
our whole question about antlers in general. Because here these
females running oud with them. What does it mean? Uh,
points out an in tiny monogamous deer and antelope populations, Uh,
(19:01):
the females and the males tend to look more alike.
There's less difference. Uh there, you know, they're pair bonded.
They have basic horns or antlers to defend against predators,
nothing fancy. Meanwhile, when you look at the larger species,
that's where you see more of this male competition U
and for the females, and you see this difference, uh,
this antler or hornet difference between the males and the females. Well,
(19:23):
so to me that uh, that gets more to the
question of sexual selection, because then you start to think
about peacocks and the male peacocks and their glorious displays
like big of the display, the more they seem like
they would be the ones to mate with, or at
least that's the idea. And particularly when you consider that
whole and logic with antlers and protection, like if that's
(19:43):
what they're there for, it doesn't make sense because then
all dear, no matter you know, if you're you're talking
about a moose or you know, a row dear, all
of them would have a set of antlers to protect
themselves with. Indeed, now, two of the theories out there
regarding why have antlers? Why have horns if you're if
(20:05):
you're a female in the species. One of these is
the hypothesis proposed by Richard Estes, who works with the
wildebeest in East Africa, and he suggests that hornet or
antler females benefit by confusing adult males as to who
the young males and the group are, So the strategy
here would be to keep the young males in the
group longer so they can grow bigger before heading out
(20:25):
on their own. Now, a more recent theory proposed by A.
Ted Stankowich of the University of Massachusetts and Tim Carrow
of the University of California. Davis argues that females can't
really hide in protective cover, and that those who must
defend a feeding territory are more likely to have horns
or antlers than those who live in a protective habitat
or don't defend a territory. So the argument here is,
(20:47):
we see females with antlers among caribou and reindeer because
they're living out in the open, out to clear visibility.
They can't just depend on running and hiding, so that
they would need those antlers in a sense for for
for action, but also just to not stand out from
the antler and protective male members of the society. Yeah.
(21:08):
I think there's just so many different factors that play
into this um and so the jury is out, but
I guess we could all probably agree that they likely
serve as both armament and ornament. Yeah, and then there
are even additional theories, like there's the theory that reindeer
all have the antlers because they use their antlers as
tools to clear away snow when they're feeding snow plowing.
(21:30):
But then, for instance, what do you think then when
you look at the moose, because there's an argument that
in moose, the antlers may act as a large hearing aid. Um,
that makes sense because they have more of a surface area.
Makes sense. Yeah, but then why do only male moose
have those antlers because they never listen. So hopefully that
(21:51):
that relays something of the mystery surrounding the antler and
why we're still studying antlers and trying to to figure
out exactly why they evolved and how they function, uh,
for for these these different deer and deer light creatures. Indeed,
and now we're gonna take a quick break. When we
get back, we're going to talk about how antlers are
exquisitely sensitive to their environment. All right, we're back. Uh,
(22:20):
we're discussing antlers. We've talked about antlers and their their
their cultural impact on humans, and our attempts to understand
them and their their owners from sort of a supernatural standpoint.
We've talked about our scientific attempts to understand what antlers
are and why they form and what function they serve.
Now we're going to discuss the role that the environment
(22:42):
plays in the formation of antlers and and indeed the
the cyclical nature of antler growth and shedding. Which is
all dependent on the amount of light that they are
exposed to. And uh, I'm really enjoying the fact that
this is coming up again because we've been talking about
light and dark and how it so much the underpinnings
of each species existence. Well, here again is another great example,
(23:06):
because there's something called the photo period, and what we're
talking about is an interval in a twenty four hour
period during which a plant or an animal is exposed
to light. And of course periods of sunlight alter during
the course of the year. It's seasonally dependent. And uh,
and there's a seasonal cycle to what the deer a
doing to their breeding cycle, and and and as we've discussed,
most of the theories with the antlers seem to revolve
(23:28):
around the use of antlers as a as a display,
as a as as a weapon in the acquiring of
of mates. So if you look at these this photo period,
then you know it's pretty obvious that in the summer,
you have longer days, you have more sunlight, and bucks
produce higher levels of testosterone, which in turn trigger antler developments.
(23:48):
So antlers start as cartilage growing from bass. The spaces
that we called out earlier called pedicles and a fuzzy
skin known as velvet, which is really rich in blood
vessels in its sense of to the touch, it supplies
the growing antlers with essential nutrients. Now I'm not going
to call it an umbilical cord, but it's doing the
same sort of job here essentially. Yeah, just as a
(24:09):
side note to touch on the testesterone issue, you have
a deer is castrated, either on purpose or just by
accident in the course of its life, it will stop
this cycle of growth. It will grow one pair of
misshapen antlers and then keep those for the rest of
its life. Now, if it's not castrated, which out in
the wild, assuming that's not going to happen, And as
the amount of daylight dwindles later in summer, the bucks
(24:32):
go through another testosterone increase and that triggers a mineralization
and hardening of the antlers. And then you get into
fall and you have the bucks rubbing their antlers on
vegetation to remove the velvet, and that reveals these bony antlers,
and that carries them through fall in winter, and then
(24:52):
after the breeding season you have a drop in a
bucks to suster and level, and that triggers the antlers
to release from the pedicles, and then within days you
have a formation of a scab like material over those pedicles,
and the process starts anew with the development of these
new growth cells for the antlers. So obviously, if you're
(25:14):
going to go out in the woods and look for antlers,
winter is the time to do it because shed antlers
are often difficult to find really because they have this
high protein content and in abundance of calcium phosphate, so
rodents are quick to consume them. So if you do
find antlers in the wild, uh, you know, snatch them
up and consider yourself lucky. Or if you're a rodent, uh,
(25:34):
you know, half a bike. Although do you consider that
it is someone's habitat right that rodents like what it end? Yeah,
you are interfering with the habitat, I take. But then
you can argue that while we already unbalanced the habitats,
so there should be plenty of antlers out there, so
maybe we're just doing our part to keep that the
rodent skin. I don't know, I don't know. Now, the
significance of the photo period is really huge, and controlled
(25:55):
lab experiments, bucks have been capable of producing multiple sets
of antlers in a single year, as well as retaining
a single set of antlers for several years just by
altering the amount of light that they're exposed to. Wow,
see that that's good information because I found myself wondering
when I was reading about this, was like, what have
you took a deer from North America? You put it
on a plane, booked at a flight all the way
(26:17):
to Australia. What happens? You know, because you're shifting the seasons,
you're shifting light, and obviously, yeah, you change the amount
of light the deer is getting. You end up hacking
into that antler antler cycle. So there you go. Indeed,
now I do want to point out that antler is bone,
but it is particularly tough bone because obviously our own
bones break when they encounter a lot of force. And
(26:39):
when you see two moose or cariboo or or deer
going at it with their antlers, Uh, it's it's almost
kind of shocking that you're not seeing antler's just splinter
and break all over the place. Well, there's a two
thousand and nine study from John Curry at the University
of York in the UK, and uh, he was looking
at the structure of the antlers, how you know how
much uh wear and tear they can take. And he
(27:01):
found that hardened antlers, that's the the antlers that they
have in fall for the breeding season, um that they
are two point four times tougher than normal wet bone.
And he also found that they could survive impacts six
times greater than the than impacts that shatter a wet femur.
That's why this tamurai warrior bore them on it on
(27:23):
his helmet, right, Yeah, just one more reason to embody
that creature and whist and risk dear madness before you
go into battle. Now, speaking of Eastern traditions, with antlers,
you can do more than just wear them on your helmet.
You can, of course grind them up and uh and
(27:45):
use them in your medicine. Dear antler has been a
common ingredient in Chinese tonic preparations for some time, dating
back at least two thousand years, and in Chinese traditional
medicine is thought to nourish the en, tonify the kidney,
invigorate the spleen, strengthened bones and muscles, and promote blood flow,
and it's still used in inter Chinese traditional medicine today
to treat a number of ailments including memory, hyperplasia, malignant sores,
(28:08):
children's moms, etcetera. Now in the West, UM, some researchers
are are very interested in the antlers because of the
rapid growth of antlers. So at the height we're talking
about an eighth of an inch a day, which is
pretty incredible. So they're interested because they're thinking about this
sort of regenerative properties that the cells possessed. They're also
(28:30):
looking to antlers as treatments for maladies like osteo arthritis. Yeah.
In fact, that two thousand twelve study from the University
of Casilla la Mancha in Spain UH suggests that the
origin of osteoporosis could be directly linked to a lack
of minerals essential to calcium absorption, namely magnanese, rather than
(28:50):
a lack of calcium. And this is all based on
their studies of antlers. And this is because the previous
antler studies have shown that magnese is necessary for calcium absorption.
So this hypothesis cell bowls around the idea that when
the human body is of less manganese or when it
is sent from the skeleton to other organs that require it,
such as the brain. The calcium that's extracted at the
(29:10):
same time is then not probably absorbed and is excreted
in the urine, which is really important, right because a
lot of people who are trying to avoid osteoporosis are
trying to really take a lot of calcium supplements or
added to their diet with foods. But if you don't
have the manganese to help facilitate absorption, well then it
doesn't matter, right. Yeah, any kind of study that is
(29:32):
looking into the formation of bone or the the weakening
of bone, uh and antlers provide a very interesting and
very extreme model to study. Now, a team of researchers
in this Little Korea reported finding evidence that deer antlers
contain multipotent stem cells that could be useful for tissue
(29:53):
regeneration in veterinary medicine. UM. They specifically noted that injury
to wild animals, including deer themselves, could be treated using
deer antler derived cells, and they pointed out that studies
involving the use of horse stem cells have found clinical
application of equ wine derived stem cells, So, in other words,
perhaps this could make its way to humans as well.
(30:16):
Speaking of consumption by humans, um, some of you may
be familiar with a deer velvet uh, the common name
of a product made from growing antlers of deer during
that stage when they're covered in that soft velvety substance
we were discussing earlier, and you will find it in
a number of non f d A approved and the
varying degrees of suspicious products to to help you, help
(30:40):
you heal after an injury, to help you in your training, etcetera. Yeah,
dear velvet contains a growth hormone called insulin like grip
factor one or i g F one, and as you say,
it's an unproven performance enhanced are often used by athletes
who think that it could help heal cartilage and tendant
injuries more quickly and boo their strength and endurance. Yeah,
(31:02):
it's a it's a growth hormone, and these can be
useful for you know, for instance, young people that have
you know, stunted growth. It can be people who suffer
from dwarf is UM related to factors of that are
and even in the healing of cartilage and intended injuries.
But it's generally not something that gets recommended for people
who are just training and wanting to bulk up, because
(31:24):
there can be a number of adverse side effects, including
the tendons becoming too tight and uh and and easy
to break. Or it can even disrupt the way that
the body metabolizes fats and sugar. So it can it
can throw things out of whack. Indeed, it can. So
don't don't take that dear Antler supplement. It's just I mean,
you're trying to hack into your own body and do
(31:45):
That's just not a good idea. Um. Now, recently a
hunter in Slovenia brought down a row deer with what
appeared to be a unicorn horn, a single horn, a
single uh and their like formation atop its head. Instead
it to and in a way like the unicorn is
is is very much in that that area of the
(32:07):
mystical deer, you know, it's the mystical forest animal that's
it's holy and elusive and uh and so well you've
seen that Tom Cruise documentary legend, right, yes, yeah, I
was just thinking about that the the other day when
when I saw this this article, Because there's a whole
goblins are hunting the unicorn for the devil, you know,
your typical goblin, devil, unicorn plot um. But in this case,
(32:33):
this was not an actually unicorn. This was again a
deer with two outhers that were grown together. Uh And
and this was just a really rare form of antler deformity.
But that there are a number of antler deformities that
can take place due to injury to the pedical um,
injury to the animal itself, dietary genetic aspects, castration that
we mentioned earlier, So you do see a lot of
(32:56):
malformation of antlers out there in the deer moves, heraboo
reindeer populations, and this just was an extreme example of that.
It was because the pedicles grew together, so it appeared
to be just like a single unicorn like protrusion. I
thought it was interesting with the article that we're looking at.
They pointed out that the hunter probably was not able
(33:17):
to identify it as having a single um antler as
opposed to to before he shot it, because instantly people
would say, why did you kill the unicorn? Why not?
Why not bring this in? And indeed he might have
been the kicking himself because you could have taken this
thing on the road, right And then he came up
with some sort of folkloric rationalization for it. Right, it
made me follow it into the forest. There you go
(33:40):
into the deeper woods and you have no choice but
to kill it lest it draw you in. And you
see a naked goddess and then you turned into a
deer and eaten by hounds and it's all over. Yeah, psycle,
life cycle of life, all right. So there you have it,
The mystery of the antler, just a you know, a
crash course in um, the cultural importance of deer and antlers,
(34:02):
the science of of antlers. What we know? What questions
still remain? And uh, and we'd love to hear from
anyone out there who has, uh, some added bits that
they've come across, or just their own experience with the
elusive and mystical deer. Might I insert a slight diversion,
because I cannot you know how you're you're you're sitting
here thinking, and you're podcasting, and you have like the
(34:23):
one nagging thought. And I was thinking a lot of this,
These these antlers bring up again, these tropes of masculinity
and so forth. And then I thought about a picture
that a Swedish woman recently showed me that seems to
be an American thing, and which instead of like fastening
antlers to your car saying, which I've seen before, people
(34:43):
are putting what looks to be um iron castings of
testicles hanging from the front of their cards. You know
of this? Oh? Yes, are you? Are you being facetious?
I've been took a Swedish woman I know to show me.
I was like, wait, are you sure this is an
American Oh? I I almost mentioned them them earlier. I
believe they're called truck nuts, and yeah, they've they've been
(35:04):
around for a while. I think they started showing up
a few years back. And it indeed is about making
your your truck more masculine, I guess by putting testicles
on it. Um. I don't pretend to to understand it,
but it seems to be very much composed of the
same energy as as putting these protective, uh you know,
dear motifs on your Yeah. I thought, wow, like gun
(35:26):
racks aren't enough and and antlers aren't enough, that you've
gotta have truck nuts. Yeah, I mean it's it's always
seemed a little bit weird to me too, because it's
like they're exposed, right there on the truck, like even
on the human body. It's kind of kind of ridiculous.
And if you're just parking your truck at Walmart and
has it's it's testicles hanging out, you're just asking for
somebody to to kick your truck on them balls or
(35:49):
or to do something worse to the balls. I mean, yeah,
I want to weave this into some sort of vulnerability
thing like Burnet Brown's talk on vulnerability and how important
this is. So maybe it's a way of saying you
have signfortable Sometimes these are am I not, because if
they cast right your trucks, then the the antlers are
going to grow weird. AND's nicely done. You wrap that up. Okay, Um, guys,
(36:13):
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