Human vs Chimp

[AskWazzup]

This has been haunting me for the past few days - fucking chimps. Ever since i saw someone post that a chimp is 5 time stronger than a human, which is of course bullshit, i have been wondering, just how strong is a chimp. Some studies say that they can pull the same weight as an average human male, which makes a little compact chimp 2 times stronger than an average male. Then of course there are those attacks, where chimps attack, bite off balls, noses etc. just fuck up someone real bad, but it's always some weakling male, or female. So in some of the forums i have been to, most people think a human has no chance against a chimp, as if it was some mythical killer, but my ego just can't accept a dwarf primate, having his way with a physically strong human, i just don't see it.

How do you think a strong wrestler, or mma type of guy (260 pounds of muscle) would fare against a chimp? I think i would pay to see that .



It seems here that the chimp had his hands full with that scrawny man and couldn't hold him down.



Gorilla having his way with a chimp, until he chickens out.

 

[Gizmojunk]

I've read that it's 10x, not 5x; and it's of the average, not the exception (for either).

 

[AskWazzup]

I've read that it's 10x, not 5x; and it's of the average, not the exception (for either).

If they were 10 times stronger, they could lift cars of the ground and would be the top of the chain predators, throwing lions and tigers around like it's nothing.

I can't see a chimp doing this to a man:

 

[Gizmojunk]

Relative no?

An ant can lift 50x its weight; a flea can jump 600x its height; most men can't lift twice their weight, nor jump even a third of their height.

If the chimp is the size of a child, I can imagine the chimp is 10x as strong as the child. If the chimp were [hypothetically] 6'6", I can see them as 10x as strong as a footballer.

 

[AskWazzup]

I'm getting confused here, are you kidding, or are you being serious about the 10x stuff?

Also, the ant comparison is not valid. There is a negative exponential progression in the ratio of your weight and the weight you can lift. If the ant would be human sized it would have no chance of lifting 50x. The size difference between a chimp and a human is minute compared to an ant. If a grown chimp is 10 times stronger than the footballer(who can usually push, lift and bench press weights in range of 400 to 800 pounds), then that would mean this crazy fucking chimp (say 200 pounds a normal weight for some chimps) could lift weights over 1.5 tons at least. The other strange thing is that you are comparing height as opposed to weight. A 6'6 chimp is a gorilla. And as i stated the myth of 5-10x strong was already debunked in the 40', at least from what i have found. Where are you getting this information?

 

[Gizmojunk]

I'm getting confused here, are you kidding, or are you being serious about the 10x stuff?

Serious that that's what I read? Of course...
Serious that I think it's true... I've never encountered a chimp up close, so I have no idea ~personally.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2009/02/how_strong_is_a_chimpanzee.html

Also, the ant comparison is not valid.

Ant comparison to what?

The purpose of mentioning the ant and flea is the mention of 'relative' strengths. Relatively speaking, the flea's jumping feat is like a man leaping 600 feet into the air... but no one is suggesting that that's actually possible. If an ant were human size, it might have a tough enough time standing, let alone lifting a log (instead of a leaf).

 

[Crni Vuk]

I could imagine that a chimp can be quite dangerous if he's in a rage, people should not make the mistake to compare a chimp to a highly trained athlete, not to mention that a chimp has a different physiology, so he could eventually hit harder then a human in a comparable situation,, I mean he has longer arms, a different body/weight ratio and thus slightly different muscles compared to the average human, not to mention that quite often when you see a chimp attacking a human it happens in unexpected situations, they get people often by surprise! A well placed hit to the face and you are suddenly in a defensive position while a creature with quite some teeth is attacking you constantly. Hell there have been cases - albeit rare! where simple HOUSE cats fended of intruders. And my dog, who is probably half the height of a child once defended me from 2 teenage bullies. Never understimate what a ferocious attitude can do to someone!

Gorilla having his way with a chimp, until he chickens out.

A Gorilla could have his way with pretty much anything ... if he wanted. I would not be surprised if a Gorilla could crack open a coconut just with his fist.

Also, I have no clue how accurate this is, but it sounds pretty logic to me

 

[SnapSlav]

If they were 10 times stronger, they could lift cars of the ground and would be the top of the chain predators, throwing lions and tigers around like it's nothing.

You do realize that station on the food chain is NOT related to physical strength, I hope? Homo Sapiens inhabit the top of the food chain because of our intelligence and creativity. We're physically weaker than many predatory species, but what does that matter when we can build barriers, traps, and enclosed settlements? What does it matter that a massive mammal could crush a human when the human can just chuck spears at it, run away, and let it bleed out? We're not at the top of the food chain because we're strong at all.

MOST primates are physically superior to humans in terms of strength in proportion to their body size, and that's just a consequence of selective mutation. A subset of species that survive past another subset because of a peculiar mutation passes down genes that favor that mutation, and the more generations that survive, the fewer of the other mutations get passed down. Humans have regressed physically because we've flourished due to mutations peculiar to our mental capacity. Our bodies possess the recessive potential to be close to (if not on par with) the strength of our distant relatives, but those are largely reserved for those stories of people using huge bursts of adrenalin to perform "super human feats", which by all indicators are actually perfectly human... just recessive.

 

[zegh8578]

I like how human history consists of lord-of-the-rings-ish warfare between different types of humans, where we are Mordor - and we win!

 

[AskWazzup]

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2009/02/how_strong_is_a_chimpanzee.html

This article mentions that "But the "five times" figure was refuted 20 years after Bauman's experiments. In 1943, Glen Finch of the Yale primate laboratory rigged an apparatus to test the arm strength of eight captive chimpanzees. An adult male chimp, he found, pulled about the same weight as an adult man."

Ant comparison to what?

To relative strength, you mentioned that chimp strength is relative to his size, but chimps are not all that smaller than humans, some weigh about the same size, so if talking in relative terms, a 10x chimp would be a damn killer of everything.

I could imagine that a chimp can be quite dangerous if he's in a rage

Oh for sure, that's why i'm interested in this speculation, what if a human who would not be sneaked attacked, but could see it coming, a well trained, very strong human, could he possibly subdue a grown chimp. I know their muscle fibers are more compact and explosive, but in comparison to an average human male, some people are 2 times stronger than an average male and have great technique to get good leverage on throws, punches and grappling. No killer teeth though.

You do realize that station on the food chain is NOT related to physical.......

Well i'm not denying that humans have lost their physical gifts in millions of years (actually it's pretty strange, that humans who were hunting mammoths were very much the same as us in body structure) and am sure as hell not claiming that this would be the world of the apes . "Top of their food chain", i don't put homo sapiens in this calculation.

Also, i think those adrenalin stories are more myth than fact, as there is no way a human body could pull of those feats with just a bigger intake of adrenaline.

I like how human history consists of lord-of-the-rings-ish warfare between different types of humans, where we are Mordor - and we win!

Written history! Which is a small part of actual human history.

 

[Crni Vuk]

Oh for sure, that's why i'm interested in this speculation, what if a human who would not be sneaked attacked, but could see it coming, a well trained, very strong human, could he possibly subdue a grown chimp. I know their muscle fibers are more compact and explosive, but in comparison to an average human male, some people are 2 times stronger than an average male and have great technique to get good leverage on throws, punches and grappling. No killer teeth though.

now you're getting specific though, again, are we comparing the average chimp to the average human? Or to a well trained athelete? Like a wrestler, iron pumper etc.? I guess a very well trained person who is at his physical optimum could probably beat a chimp, I saw a martial arts expert on TV who was faster then a Cobra, and those animals are considered very fast, but yeah, the guy is very well trained! But I would not be surprised if a chimp is stronger then a human, I mean if you compare the average chimp to the average human, then you could also compare the hercules of chimps to the hercules of humans, and the hercules chimp would still win :p

I am also curious how you actually want to really measure a chimps strength - or any strength, because you can not simply tell the animal that it should use its full strength, like under really heavy stress. So I would take it with a grain of salt. In TV I saw once a zoologist talking about the orangutan they have, they had this ball that would measure the force when you squezed it, and they gave it to the orangutan, I dont remember anymore the force they measured, but it was far beyond anything a human could do to it, just from a what looked like a normal squeze and he said that he believed the ape didnt even used its full strength, he would not be surprised if it could crush a coconut with those hands just like that.

Who knows? Maybe, if a chimp would really go the maximum and his limits he could lift a car! But the real reason he could not make it is because his joints and all that would simply give up and tear apart before he lifts it? You know, like at 5:05 ...



In any case, what ever the real strength of a chimp is, all I know is that I dont want get in a fight with those furr-balls of teeth and paws :p

Also, i think those adrenalin stories are more myth than fact, as there is no way a human body could pull of those feats with just a bigger intake of adrenaline.

It is incredible though what the human body can all do when its either on its limits or when a lot of adrenaline is pumping trough it. Many war time stories involved such feats, heh like that Korean war veteran who was stuned about how some chinese soldiers could still go on and fight even after a 50 call from his machinegun blown off half of their abdomen. I also remember that I have read somewhere that we have actually a kind of fail-save system in our brain which prevents us from using our muscles to their full strength for the simple reason that we dont damage our joints, bones etc. the weak points of our body. However, what happens when this fail save system doesnt work, can be seen when people get certain neurological issues, for example like epilepsy. Even several people can not manage to controll a person that has such spams.

 

[zegh8578]

AskWazzup, what? Maybe my joke was a bit obscure

Humanity and Chimpanzeeity split ways, biologically, around 5 million years ago.
At this point, well, at this point exactly, we are pretty much still chimps BUT give us a million years to disperse, and this is when the fun beguns (recent research suggests its even more chaotic than we think)
the "proto-humans" if you will, begin to settle every corner of Africa, and therefore begin to specialize to various lifestyles and therefore split up into several different species.
There are tall-humanoids, short-humanoids, furry-humanoids, bald-humanoids, there is a species for every way of life.

All these species, they don't just vanish. Most "common people" imagine human evolution as a linear arrow - and it kindov IS - it's just one arrow - in a pool of arrows! All those other human species - they are our competitors. Our competitors - and: They got to go!
Genetics suggest that we did some inter-fuckin w the Neanderthals - which are our very last surviving competitor - also one of the last evolved. Our common ancestor beat, killed, ate away earlyer human forms, long before both .sapiens and .neanderthalenis came to exist - but after we came to exist, neanderthalenis was just one more competitor, that had to die.

We could talk to our rivals.
We could! Neanderthals could talk, and dress, and decorate themselves.

Can you imagine!?

Can you imagine being a neanderthal? Knowing, KNOWING, that the other humans, are better than you. The same way we imagine aliens to be better than us, or the same way a brain-damaged person understands that other people are smarter than then - neanderthals would possibly have the mental capacity to know... that the other-humans are smarter than them, more dangerous.

Can you imagine the screaching little H. floresiensis? The hobbits?
We killed them too. Most likely we met them, were freaked the fuck out by them, and fucking killed them.
Fuck you Frodo!

 

[SnapSlav]

Humanity and Chimpanzeeity split ways, biologically, around 5 million years ago.
At this point, well, at this point exactly, we are pretty much still chimps

This is a common, if problematic misconception with the theory of evolution. The idea that rewinding the clock to the point where different species diverged from the same species that either were the same thing. The actual state is that when "Chimpanzees and Human Beings split" it was from an ancestral species, neither chimp nor human. The important difference is that the mistake makes the false assumption that (since it's usually referring to humans and our closest primate relatives) the other species "stayed the same" while ours continued to evolve. No, both continued evolving, just in separate directions. That's why "back then we're pretty much chimps" is incorrect to state. "We" were a different, ancestral species of primate which divergently spawned both chimps and humans. Even then, the implication of actively choosing creation makes that statement false. As you can see, discussing a subject that transpires over millions of years (beyond the scope of human comprehension) means you've gotta walk on egg shells or you risk falsely representing it quite easily.

 

[zegh8578]

^I know that, but I wanted to avoid "the block of text", cus I was mostly being funny

I thought adding "pretty much" would be enough to separate from "we were chimps, exactly."

Because, you know, we WERE pretty much chimps, 5 million years ago. And Chimpanzees were pretty much chimpanzees as well ;D
(to avert more specific argumentation: By that I mean - the physiology of the ancestor of human + the ancestor of chimps = our common ancestor - was, at the time, practically identical to the physiology of todays chimpanzees. Gorillas and Orangutans separate even earlyer, here we're talking 10-15 million years, afaik)

Pretty much! Not exactly!

Don't worry tho, I got a cladistics fanatic on my FB who corrects these things incessantly "NO! It is the last-common-ancestor to all terrestrial vertebrate craniate tetrapods!" jeez-louise dude, just call it "fish" like the rest of us okay?

 

[Korin]

Animals in general will fuck you up because they are absolutely insane. When they get angry/scared they might as well be on PCP.

 

[zegh8578]

Animals in general will fuck you up because they are absolutely insane. When they get angry/scared they might as well be on PCP.

I have always lived by the rule that: Any animal larger than half my weight, will have the potential of fucking me up. As in, murder me and eat me. Practically every damn animal in existence, can cause me injury, such as bite or poke w a spike or whatever

 

[Korin]

That's the difference between an animal and a human. A human is going to take a stance. Put his fists up. He's going to punch and kick you, maybe tackle you. Even if drunk/insane, there's a kind of method to their combat. An animal is not like this. They don't think and reason strategically, they will bite anything they can get a hold of, scratch, claw and kick you as much and anywhere possible with almost complete immunity to whatever pain you can inflict. A man might put you down on the ground and punch you repeatedly in the head but a chimp will rip your face off and eat it, even if he isn't hungry. After he kills you he won't spend any time mulling over thoughts of remorse. He's probably going to go eat a banana, maybe jerk off in a tree somewhere.

 

[zegh8578]

I got bit in the ass by a dog, because his owner (a terrified old man) was staring at me, terrified, for no good goddamn reason.

The fascinating thing here, is that the dog - as soon as clamping its teeth around my ass-cheek, immediately let go of me. The dog... the DOG... understood better, than its human owner, that I was completely harmless, just passing through. As I looked back at them, the dog was staring up at his - still terrified looking owner, with a face of "dude, whats wrong with you man!?"

(seriously, that old man was spending his whole fucking afternoon, standing in the alley, with a "D:!!!"-face on him. Goddamn... send him to a fucking home allready!!!)

 

[AskWazzup]

Well humans are pretty brittle, but there are cases where they escape death against much more terrifying creatures such as Bears, Lions etc. even after getting caught or bitten.

I wonder... Say this crazy chimp bites my fingers, then with the other arm i stab it's eyes and take a good hold of those eye sockets... Surely, that could give you dividents, even if you're not build like a tank? Or play the chimp game and bite its balls or dick off, i think that kind of pain is much more to take in than just being shot at, or stabbed.

 

[zegh8578]

Well humans are pretty brittle, but there are cases where they escape death against much more terrifying creatures such as Bears, Lions etc. even after getting caught or bitten.

I wonder... Say this crazy chimp bites my fingers, then with the other arm i stab it's eyes and take a good hold of those eye sockets... Surely, that could give you dividents, even if you're not build like a tank? Or play the chimp game and bite its balls or dick off, i think that kind of pain is much more to take in than just being shot at, or stabbed.

It definitely is possible to physically fight a stronger wild animal. There are tons of individual stories. Often it helps with attitude, making yourself intimidating (and meaning it )
If you have even the slightest weapon, the excellence-of-humanity immediately shows through, now you can fight off even a bear with a wood-carving knife (as in a fairly recent swedish event, where one guy was mauled badly, another stabbed at the bear, chasing it away, if i remember it correctly)

But think of an animal as a huge karate-dude. Sure, if you are REALLY lucky, you'll get that lucky punch in, trip him over, and break his head against the pavement. But in most cases, you will try to back down, you'll try to negotiate, instinctively, and you'll be chewed up.

At a party, this guy told me "nifty tricks" how to beat a full grown lion hand to hand
He told me "grab on to the lions neck, really hard, w both arms. It's arms are too large, it wont be able to reach you, cus of the wide elbows" something like that.
I asked him a couple of things, neither of which he could answer: "How do you cope with a 200 kilo lion slamming you down at 70 kmph?" "how long are you supposed to hold on?" "what if the lion decides to stay on top of you? with 200 kilos? can you bench 200 kilos?"