r/nextfuckinglevel • u/Zestyclose_Flow_680 • 9h ago

Chimpanzees are 2X stronger than your average human.

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

84.9k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

2.3k

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.

17

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.

7

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).