Everything always comes at a cost. I’m guessing that the increased upper body strength reduces chimps’ ability to run long distances. I saw a show about how Bushmen are able to outrun gazelle. It takes them literally all day, but they can eventually run the animal down & kill it. As far as I know, there isn’t any kind of great ape that can sustain that kind of long range marathon running.
I’m guessing it comes at the expense of their palate, so that instead of being able to enjoy caviar and a fine Merlot they prefer to snack on NASCAR testicles.
Moe was in the animal sanctuary as part of a settlement because he allegedly bit off a woman’s finger in the Davis’ home.
Well, for one, she didn’t possess gonads…
Pardon my pedantry Brendan, but actually she did. She just didn’t possess male gonads.
The following youtube video, entitled “Guinness World Record Man Takes Off Half His Face”, can probably get you up to date on modern day facial prosthetics.
The “5x upper body strength” thing is obviously bullshit, the kind of urban myth that Wikipedia loves to spread. For starters, upper body strength varies greatly between human males, and the average chimp is probably in better shape than the average human, what with living in a jungle and climbing trees all the time.
But I can believe that a chimp’s upper body strength relative to total body weight is significantly higher, maybe even up to twice a human’s. After all we have relatively long legs, and a big share of our total muscle mass is used just to keep us upright. Chimps have relatively short and weak legs. Most of the muscle mass would be concentrated in the upper body, ergo lots of strength there.
You might find it hard to believe, but a famous american has a false nose. Many falsely believe repeatedly use of plastic surgery are the cause, but no. It has just been an attempt to conceal the damage done by his pet chimp.
At the same time he was smitten with some unknown virus from the chimp that in time has paled the tone of his skin.
This has traumatized him in such a degree that he has returned to his childhood, which is shown by his preference in the company of young boys. In all innocence off cource.
Now then – about this bridge I’ve got for sale…
As I recall, there’s allegedly a big difference in “percentage of muscle fibers activated at once” between humans and most other animals. No reference, however, but the notion is when you are exerting your “maximum strength”, the muscle isn’t really operating at 100% – in fact it supposedly isn’t even operating at 50%.
This is presumably why most other animals are stronger, pound per pound, than humans despite having more or less similar muscle tissue, and presumably explains chimpanzee strength better than the vague bullshit about “denser bones” I read in one article. Denser bones may allow more application of strength, but it has to come from muscle tissue at some point.
Supposedly various feats of “hysterical strength” can come from more fiber activation than usual under stress. However, this seems somewhat dubious to me, as you’d think that someone in all these millenia of athletic and martial competition would have come up with a way to activate it deliberately.
Why humans should have sacrificed muscle strength in their evolution seems like a good question to me. I can’t see why, myself, unless there is a biochemical explanation for some hormones that happen to increase intelligence in brain development but have a dystrophic side effect.
I suppose it also may have something to do with endurance; perhaps it allows more endurance for lengthy “cursorial hunting” expeditions, where prey needs to be run down over many hours or even days. I remember reading that athletic humans can run down horses and similar fast animals just by continuing to jog after them – the horses or whatever are always faster over short periods, but eventually run out of endurance when chased for long periods.
I don’t know about the actual multiplier, 5x might well be too high, but as posted in the previous little item, I think that chimpanzee muscles are stronger per pound than humans. Clearly it’s not based on percentage of torso comparisons, it’s absolute length of the muscles that would make a difference. A tall human clearly has a longer torso, and I would guess, approximately as long arms as a chimp. Chimpanzees aren’t in better shape than human athletes, so that is not an explanation, either.
Chimps evolved for brachiation. They’re stronger because the leverage of their joints is different. As anyone who remembers high school physics will recall, moving the fulcrum of a lever trades force for distance.
What that means is that chimps can’t move their limbs as fast. They have the tremendous power required to swing from tree to tree. But they don’t have the physical attributes required to run for hours at a steady jog, wearing out your prey, or to throw rocks and spears at it from a safe distance once it’s been driven it to ground.
Humans are scary, too.
The previous posters and I were talking about the relationship to total body mass. Humans have significantly longer and stronger legs than chimps, ergo a bigger proportion of the total muscle mass is in the lower body.
Chimpanzees aren’t in better shape than human athletes, so that is not an explanation, either.
Yes, but my point was that it wasn’t clear whether the comparison was to human athletes or average humans.
About the “muscle fibers activated at once” stuff… I really want to see a reference for that because it sounds like yet another urban legend to me, like those claims that “we only use 10% of our brain”. But it’s perhaps plausible that chimps, being wild animals and all, more easily go into a frenzy when fighting and thus reach their full strength potential almost immediately.
Yeah, I read it some years ago, don’t remember where, sorry, so it must be taken with a grain of salt, as I sort of suggested.
After reading this thread I was looking for images of chimps and I really liked this one. Anyway, related to the topic at hand, look at those arms. They seem pretty massive.
I’ve been watching Monkey Business/Monkey Life for years. It follows life at Monkey World and has been a long running show on TV. The two alpha males they have in each group are massive, and when they are wound up, with fur on end and tensed with every muscle on show, you can easily realise where the statement comes from.
Paddy, the alpha male at Monkeyworld resembles a hairy Incredible Hulk and I could see him ripping off limbs with barely a shrug. The study linked above had a 135 pound female chimp dragging 1260 pounds with one arm and he’s significantly bigger.
Chimps can bench 1000 pounds and throw 400 MPH fastballs!
Fantastic, now I have images in my head of an all-chimp baseball team clowning on the other clueless human teams like the Harlem Globetrotters. Well, that’s it for my productivity today.
Quick, someone get Carrot Top on the phone!
So now I’m picturing my simian baseball team tearing Carrot Top limb from limb. Ha, oh you monkeys.
We have a winner!
This is about it. It involves where the tendons attach to the bones and the resultant torque they get out of the deal. They have greater torque, which means they can exert more force, but not for as long a time because it requires more activity from the muscles.
As for the evolution of humans “sacrificing” muscle strength, it isn’t really that simple. For one thing, chimps aren’t exactly a throwback from earlier on in our evolution - they’ve evolved as much as we have since whatever common ancestors we had. For another, our more developed brains and ability to use tools meant our survival became less dependent (though obviously still somewhat dependent) on physical strength.