Chimpanzees strength: long over-estimated?

November 10, 2022 11:09 AM

In 1923 a primatologist named John Bauman conducted the first quantitative test comparing human and chimpanzee strength. His conclusion, that pound-for-pound chimpanzees were "more than three" times stronger than humans, gave rise to almost 100 years of conventional wisdom about chimpanzees' near mythical strength. This wisdom prevailed until 2017, when a team of scientists conducted the most rigorous study to date of chimpanzee strength, and concluded they averaged only 1.5x stronger than humans. That said, if the muscles on this hairless alpha male are anything to go by, some individual chimps are probably far stronger
posted by BadgerDoctor (21 comments total)

I mean, a pissed off chimpanzee could still rip my arms off - that's enough for me to put them on the "don't care how strong you actually are" list.
posted by drewbage1847 at 11:52 AM on November 10, 2022 [5 favorites]

No man, I saw Gordy's Home. I ain't messin' with chimps.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 12:01 PM on November 10, 2022 [5 favorites]

Well sure but I bet they don't put the same emphasis on cardio he said sitting on his couch staring at a screen munching a snack.
posted by mhoye at 12:13 PM on November 10, 2022 [5 favorites]

I remember a line from the weird Matthew Broderick movie Project X, that a chimp could rip off your arms.
posted by zardoz at 12:22 PM on November 10, 2022

Maybe they are just willing to [horrible violence redacted] with regular human type strength and it turns out that is quite bad enough if you like having a face etc.?
posted by Artw at 12:33 PM on November 10, 2022 [5 favorites]

a chimp could still rip your arm off and beat you to death with it. they are not animals to be trifled with.

and yeah...Gordy's Home omfg that whole scene, its a fantastic movie but that scene was the most horrific to me.
posted by supermedusa at 1:04 PM on November 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

The case of Travis the chimp, probably the inspiration for that scene, can be looked up but I do not feel like linking it, I’ll just say it’s real bad.
posted by Artw at 1:07 PM on November 10, 2022

Maybe they are just willing to [horrible violence redacted] with regular human type strength and it turns out that is quite bad enough if you like having a face etc.?

In other words, the danger isn't that chimps possess superhuman strength, it's the fact that they possess absolutely zero chill.
posted by Atom Eyes at 1:09 PM on November 10, 2022 [6 favorites]

The real question is why do they always go for the arms?
posted by mittens at 1:10 PM on November 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

Well sure but I bet they don't put the same emphasis on cardio he said sitting on his couch staring at a screen munching a snack.

Hey but that is supposed to be one of our big advantages among the animal kingdom, no? Besides the brain thing? A lot of predators aren’t exactly marathon runners.
posted by atoxyl at 1:12 PM on November 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

It's not just strength that makes chimps deadly in a fight though. They've also got heart.

Also, it's all fine and good to say they are "only" 1.5 times as strong per unit of muscle, but how much more muscle do they have on average than us? Twice as much, making them 3 times as strong? More? Doesn't say.
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 1:37 PM on November 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

The case of Travis the chimp . . . it’s real bad.

YEP. I live in the state where that happened and let's just say that I do not care for chimpanzees at all, knowing what I know. Give me a good bonobo any day.
posted by dlugoczaj at 1:43 PM on November 10, 2022 [4 favorites]

Top comment from that last link: "One things for sure, he never skips balls day"
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:53 PM on November 10, 2022 [5 favorites]

I remember an old Tarzan movie still with Cheetah, and I think Johnny Weissmuller, in which Cheetah was behind Tarzan and reaching around T's shoulder and gripping his wrist, and Cheetah's arm was so much longer that C's elbow was much more bent than T's, C's fingers wrapped around T's wrist like 1.5 times, C's wrist and elbow were much thicker, and C's biceps and triceps were thicker too, but not bulgy— instead, they were like bars under the skin that went all the way from shoulder to elbow without changing diameter.

And I thought, 'Johnny, I wonder whether you realized you would be helpless as a baby if your costar ever went postal?'. I'd guess he did, and it gave me more respect for his courage as well as his skill as an actor.
posted by jamjam at 2:14 PM on November 10, 2022

LOTS of thoughts. (Human evolution is my grad-school jam.)

First thought: what are the odds that this paper was authored by a group of men, and contains language that makes it clear that they feel the need to prove that humans are actually really strong, not weaklings who could be bested by chimps?

Update after reading: paper indeed was authored by three folks with male-typical names, and there is a little But But But in the discussion, but this isn’t as obviously motivated by male ego as some of the self-serving trash researched or published in the name of evolution in the 90s and aughts. (Let’s film female bodies in full-body leotards rotating on a platform, variating around a .7 waist-to-hip ratio, and then show those videos to male subjects under fMRI! SCIENCE)

*These* authors are interested in muscular changes over the course of primate evolution, comparing our branch of the family to our chimp cousins, and I think that’s a pretty cool set of questions to ask.

Second thought: however, it blows my mind that the most basic theory of difference doesn’t seem to turn up in discussion (I read the first 10p or so, and then skimmed, so feel free to correct me if I missed something!). Chimps locomote on arms and legs, both across the ground (knuckle walking) and climbing. Every day is leg day, arm day, core day, all day. Play fighting and wrestling are typical “fun” activities; real fighting is common.

There are literally no humans who live this way - the closest are a relatively tiny number of people living with disability who use both arms and legs to get around, but even these folks are not spending a significant amount of their time climbing, and they are constrained from broader ranges of movement that would be routine for the average chimp.

Even Olympic athletes do not train like this, and build muscles that allow them to sprint OR persist, to punch OR run. Multi-sport athletes and MMA people are the closest human analogues I can think of in terms of their movement and motivation repertoires, but even they are not using their arms to get around when they aren’t high-jumping or skiing or kicking colleagues in the face.

So, if we accept the model produced by these authors, which is based on in-vitro analysis of muscle fibers, not observations of actual weight-bearing or speed-requiring activities in live subjects… the strength of the most-analogous humans is *still* only 2/3 that of a young male chimp who lives in a box at a human research facility.

Under these conditions, the idea that any given wild chimp is at LEAST 5x as strong as I am feels like a very generous assumption in my favor.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 2:30 PM on November 10, 2022 [10 favorites]

Thanks for the fun think, BadgerDoctor!
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 2:32 PM on November 10, 2022

Yeah, well, let me see that chimp tie some shoelaces or thread a needle. Or play a game of pub darts. Strength isn't everything. Humans are built for precision.
posted by Termite at 10:45 PM on November 10, 2022

Also, humans use tools. And tools are multipliers. And muscles have a high metabolic cost to maintain. I understand that archaic humans were more "robust" than we are, with bigger muscles and bones. They needed them. We don't and while perhaps there is some mating signalling advantage in looking fit, it's obviously not enough.

I absolutely would not ever get in a dispute with a chimp. I would not get near a chimp without a barrier. Chimps are as strong and quick as any other wild animal, but smart too and just human-like enough that we might make the mistake of thinking they would have the same social instincts we do, and they very much don't.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:13 AM on November 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

Not disagreeing that chimps are very strong but:

Even Olympic athletes do not train like this, and build muscles that allow them to sprint OR persist, to punch OR run. Multi-sport athletes and MMA people are the closest human analogues I can think of

Peasants do all this. Manual laborers in developed countries too but probably with more focus on burning up specific parts of their bodies instead of more generally wrecking them.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:13 AM on November 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

Peasants do all this. Manual laborers in developed countries too but probably with more focus on burning up specific parts of their bodies instead of more generally wrecking them.

I don’t think rrrrrrrrrt is saying that humans don’t do hard physical activity, but that we don’t to the extent and we don’t generalize to ALL of it outside of sports that purposefully do this. Laborers and construction workers sure, they’re doing physically demanding activities. They don’t usually include sprinting and endurance running, and disputes aren’t going to usually be solved by physical fights. (Usually. Depends on the after work alcohol involved I’m sure…)
posted by [insert clever name here] at 8:20 AM on November 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

we don’t to the extent and we don’t generalize to ALL of it outside of sports that purposefully do this. Laborers and construction workers sure, they’re doing physically demanding activities. They don’t usually include sprinting and endurance running, and disputes aren’t going to usually be solved by physical fights.

Well... it's like... well, why would we compare...

...guh?

We don't do the same kinds of hard physical labor in the same ways because of the whole thing where our bodies are completely different.

I agree with rrrrrrrrrt that this is like sortof silly? Kindof like comparing our flight muscles with those of birds. Perpend: we have two upper limbs and two lower limbs, just like our bird brethren. But we come up short with the flying nevertheless. Maybe it is because despite some surface similarities, when you look closely it turns out that we are anatomically rather different from birds. And also from chimpanzees!
posted by Don Pepino at 9:48 AM on November 11, 2022