If only we had chimps with 5x the lower body strength of humans. Then we could have a chimp capable of 40’ high jumps. That would be awesome!
Brian Posehn has a bit about that attack on his comedy CD. I hadn’t heard about the chimp escaping, though. Creepy.
Moe escaped, but it doesn’t sound like Moe attacked anyone. His former owner was assaulted by two other chimps, who were shot. Moe may not yet have a taste for human blood…
I’ve seen some terrible things on qt3, but the OP’s story combined with Stroker’s photo of the noseless man freaked me out like nothing I’ve seen here before. Yikes.
Jesus, do they even have prostetic noses? What, do you strap it on? I wonder if you can still smell properly with one.
Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, “he smells bad.”
You did not link to the article, which is unfortunate, as it is otherwise full of win:
The couple, who have no children, broke down in tears at a press conference in Los Angeles.
``What am I going to do?‘’ sobbed LaDonna Davis.
He meant the world to us,'' said St. James Davis.He was the best man at my wedding.‘’
I’ve seen pictures of leper victims. That was enough disfigurement to last me a lifetime.
They do have prosthetic noses, and such, mainly because of WWI, and all the victims of face injury of that war. There was a really good article in the Feb 2007 of Smithsonian about it.
If you look at evolutionary trends, why would homo-sapiens have sacrificed such exceptional upper body strength? It seems it would have made more sense to develop two legged automotion while continuing the same upper- body anatomy. I’d bet chimps have to exert a lot less energy to get the same kind of strength feats we do, and that in itself is a huge evolutoinary advantage.
Neandertals were probably pretty strong fellows. Comparatively, so much stronger that not as many predators messed with them. Therefore, they got all complacent and cave-painty while the Cro-Magnons were getting bullied by pretty much the entire animal kingdom by comparison, and got so angry at that state of affairs that they mastered fire and the art of learning not only how to bludgeon things to death with dull objects, but to chop them to death with sharper stones, or stab them to death with pointy things. Just for good measure, they figured out how to plan and communicate such complex things as “Og, Thok, and Brok: you guys go left; Grignr, Fronk, and I and will go right with the torches and flush those fucking sabertooths your way. If the spiked pits don’t kill them, hit 'em with those spears. After we take care of them, we’re going to go wipe out those Neandertal lunks, take their caves, and get totally sloshed on their fermented fruit. Break!”
I’d read a study somewhere (I really don’t remember where) that some scientists had trained a chimp to do a clean and jerk. ( ie, weight bar is on the ground in front of person/primate lifting, lift weight to waist, then shoulder,then extend arms above head)
This scientist had trained a 4-6 year old female chimp to do this and she was able to lift 600 Lbs.( I’m not sure how much the chimp weighed, but they don’t get overly huge like a similiarly trained human would, a human powerlifter is usually in the 250-300 Lb weight range)
According to the scientist a gorilla trained to lift weights in this manner should be able to lift in the 1800 Lb range.
Chimps can be scary, sure.
But, baboons on the other hand…fuck that.
I’m not sure how our common ancestors with chimps, strengthwise, would have compared to modern chimps. I wonder what kind of guesses could be made about the relative muscularity of early hominids like australopithecines.
I’ve heard it suggested that part of evolution is a question of tradeoffs – you only have so much material to work with, developmentally, so you might have to rob Peter to pay Paul. (Though obviously some creatures do evolve much larger or smaller total body mass than their ancestors, so it’s more complicated than that.) Maybe as hominids developed, certain aspects of the body (increased brain size, greater lower body strength commensurate with upright gait) required resources that might otherwise have gone into upper-body musculature. Just a guess though. Also, the selection pressure to retain massive upper-body strength probably diminishes as a) locomotion becomes entirely terrestrial and b) advanced tools allow greater hunting/killing efficiency.
Did Jane Goodall possess some sort of chimp god aura that spared her from losing her gonads and nose throughout all those years of hanging out with them?
Jane Goodall’s wikipedia bio mentions the Frodo incident where a chipmanzee ate a baby, does that help?
By the time help arrived from the research team, Frodo had scrambled up a tree and was holding the limp form of the baby, which he had begun to eat. Lacking the defensive support that the larger group would have lent him, Frodo was easily scared off, and the baby girl’s dead body was recovered.
edit:
A year later Frodo jumped on Goodall and thrashed her head so thoroughly that he nearly broke her neck. In the wake of that incident Goodall has consistently refused to enter Frodo’s territory without a pair of bodyguards along for protection.
She didn’t keep her chimps in cages for years at a time. That really pisses them off.
I ain’t clickin’ that.
Smart move.
Vincent D’Onofrio wore one in the Salton Sea (cause he done wore a hole in his face from doin’ up all theyat meth)
If you look at the grossout pic of the noseless dude, you can see three pins that probably hold the fake nose in place.