Why apes are so strong

Chimps are far stronger than we are. Slate writes :. A chimpanzee had, pound for pound, as much as twice the strength of a human when it came to pulling weights. The apes beat us in leg strength, too, despite our reliance on our legs for locomotion.

A study found that bonobos can jump one-third higher than top-level human athletes, and bonobo legs generate as much force as humans nearly two times heavier. But humans also tend to be bigger than chimpanzees in these studies, so we account for this difference by dividing force or power by body mass.

In other words, chimps can pull more stuff and jump with more power than humans once our differences in size are accounted for a typical adult chimp weighs about pounds.

These physical differences emerged over the course of the past seven to eight million years, as humans migrated away from forests and towards bipedal life on the ground. The resultant losses in maximum force and power output were offset by gains in endurance and the ability to perform repetitious, low-energy movements such as fashioning stones into tools.

Still, given the state of the world right now, seems like we got the short end of the stick. Humans may lack the strength of chimps — our closest relatives on the tree of evolution — because our nervous systems exert more control over our muscles, says evolutionary biologist Alan Walker, a professor at Penn State University.

Our fine motor control prevents great feats of strength, but allows us to perform delicate and uniquely human tasks, Walker writes in the April issue of the journal Current Anthropology. Walker's hypothesis stems partly from a finding by primatologist Ann MacLarnon, who showed that relative to body mass, chimps have much less gray matter in their spinal cords than humans have.

Chimpanzees do have stronger muscles than us — but they are not nearly as powerful as many people think. This result matches well with the few tests that have been done, which suggest that when it comes to pulling and jumping, chimps are about 1.

His findings suggest that other apes have similar muscle strength to chimpanzees. To create an accurate computer model of how chimps walk, the researchers needed to find out whether their muscles really are exceptionally strong. So they removed small samples of leg muscle from three chimps under general anaesthetic and measured the strength of individual fibres.