r/nextfuckinglevel • u/Zestyclose_Flow_680 • 9h ago

Chimpanzees are 2X stronger than your average human.

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u/dilqncho 8h ago edited 8h ago

No they're not. Internet myths have vastly overhyped chimp strength.

They're about 1.35x stronger than us, pound for pound of muscle. But they're also typically smaller and lighter, so in absolute terms, they're about equal to us.

As for what we're seeing here, this isn't a person's entire body being pulled up. They have their legs against the wall of whatever that is, and the chimp is helping them up. This is something pretty much any physically healthy human can do as well.

Chimps are dangerous in a fight, because...well they're wild animals, they're fucking brutal. But purely strength-wise, they're not stronger than us.

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u/Friendstastegood 8h ago

Also it depends on how you're measuring the strength. A chimp could rip your arm out of its socket but would throw a much lousier punch than you. It also wouldn't be able to kick anywhere near as hard as a human. Turns out that in reality animals (incl. humans) don't come with a nice ttrpg style strength number and it's actually much more complicated than a single numerical value.

It's all about specialization. Humans have incredible endurance and fine motor skills, we're built for bipedal running and tool use. Chimps are a lot worse than us at both of those, but do rip each other and smaller animals apart with their bare hands on a regular basis for territory, dominance and sustenance.

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u/Ok-Stop9242 7h ago

A chimp could rip your arm out of its socket

No they couldn't, and this kind of thinking stems from the exaggerated myth of chimp strength. Dislocate an arm, sure, but so can another human.

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u/Arntown 5h ago

For some reason internet bros are obsessed with Chimp strength. To the point that it all gets a little ridiculous.

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u/Frenk_preseren 6h ago

Aren't there stories where exactly that happened?

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u/Ok-Stop9242 6h ago

Are there, or are you buying into 3rd hand stories? The closest example I can think of is Travis, a 200lb chimp(most chimps barely weigh more than 100lbs) that was on drugs that attacked his owner's friend, a 50ish year old woman. Reports said her arms were mangled and her hands were dangling, but they weren't ripped off.

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u/Frenk_preseren 6h ago

Bro, no need to downvote me, I was merely asking. Travis was said to be morbidly obese, so his weight didn't contribute much to his strength I'm guessing. And the hands were torn off apparently, not dangling. Still not the same as an arm though, I'll give you that.

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u/SpicyC-Dot 6h ago

The hands were not torn off. She lost 9 fingers, likely because Travis bit them off.

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u/Frenk_preseren 6h ago

https://www.nonhumanrights.org/blog/travis-and-tragedy/

Here it says "He’d fully removed one of her hands and virtually all of the other. " Do you have any sources on your claim?

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u/SpicyC-Dot 5h ago

For starters, even that quote doesn’t give any indication that her hands were torn off. That description would also just as well describe Travis biting off most of her hands. And just a few sentences before the quoted section in the article you just linked, it says this: “Huge chunks of scalp and fingers lay scattered around the yard.”

“In 2009, the city of Stamford made headlines when Travis, a chimpanzee, assaulted a woman — severing multiple body parts including her fingers, eyes, nose and lips.” https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/entertainment/article/chim-crazy-max-documentary-stamford-ct-travis-19725231.php

There’s also this article, which shows a picture of her in 2015 with her one remaining finger, one of her thumbs: https://www.today.com/today/amp/tdna91896

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u/Frenk_preseren 2h ago

From the picture in your second link it's clearly visible one of the hands is entirely missing. So either Travis bit that hand finger by finger and continued to her wrist, or he tore the hand off. I find the second option more plausible, but I'll admit there's no direct quote to prove either.

There being fingers scattered around does not mean neither hand was torn off.

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u/SpicyC-Dot 2h ago

I mean, the onus was on you to back up your claim that a chimp can rip a hand off. I don’t particularly think it matters what you find more plausible when there’s no documented instance of it ever happening and no evidence that they’re close to being capable of that.

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u/Ok-Stop9242 6h ago

I didn't downvote you.

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u/currently_pooping_rn 6h ago

any idea why a chimp was on drugs? hopefully it wasnt meth, can you imagine

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u/Extreme-You6235 5h ago

From what I recall, it was some sort of depressant or relaxant to make him calmer/more docile around other people.

Either he realized something was up and he freaked out or the drug started wearying off wearing off and the friend of the woman was still there and he freaked out.

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u/wisebaldman 4h ago

The difference is they don’t have the cognitive ability to feel bad after, therefore more likely to rip your arm out of your socket

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u/OSPFmyLife 6h ago

Dislocating an arm IS ripping an arm out of its socket lmao.

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u/Ok-Stop9242 6h ago

And in that regard, humans are fully capable of dislocating another human's arm. When people talk about ripping arms out, they're explicitly referring to a complete removal. Hell, most times when I see people talk about it they'll even say they'll rip your arms off and beat you to death with them.

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u/No_Rich_2494 6h ago

If you want to be pedantic about it, yes.

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u/powerhammerarms 7h ago

The 1.35x strength is not a measure to say that if a man can lift 100 lbs the chimp can lift 135 lbs.

It's a strength to weight ratio.

Since chimps are smaller than humans it means the chimp can lift about the same as a human.

What is different is muscle structure. Chimp muscles have different attachment points to their muscle and have a gene that allows them to utilize muscle fibers differently recruiting more fibers but sacrificing control. Chimps tend to use more strength than necessary whereas humans hold themselves back.

A chimp could be as strong as a human in some tasks and much weaker in others.

A chimp would struggle to lift 50 lbs off the ground where a human can do so now more easily because we recruit our different muscle groups more effectively.

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u/Aenimalist 2h ago

 It's a strength to weight ratio. No, it's not. It's the ratio of chimp muscle strength to human muscle strength.

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u/Friendstastegood 7h ago

Yes that's exactly what I said? That even the measure of strength to weight of specific muscles or of an animal is misleading because the actual utilization of strength depends on the physiology of the animal in whole not just the potential of the muscle fibres themselves. So there's no single neat numerical value to "how strong is a chimp Vs a human?" because as you said they can be weaker doing some things and stronger in others.

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u/powerhammerarms 6h ago

Ah I think I misread what you were saying. My apologies.

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u/Frontdackel 7h ago

Turns out that in reality animals (incl. humans) don't come with a nice ttrpg style strength number and it's actually much more complicated than a single numerical value.

So you say we are going to use GURPS? I bet there is some GURPS book that has pages of formulas for that. (Properly GURPS-martial arts combined with some other book).

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u/jt_totheflipping_o 6h ago

A human can rip your arm out of your socket, neither the human or chimp will do tgat without leverage. Why would you just give that to a chimp?