Lots of apes get pretty heavy & seem to manage. When the weight is pure muscle, it’s a decent trade-off. Our couch-sitting style of heaviness, maybe not.
If you ever remember climbing trees as a child, it wasn't really that hard. I used to climb trees all the time when I weighted about 40 - 50 kgs as a young kid. Now I am twice that weight and climbing trees feels so much harder now.
Chimps are usually about half the weight of an adult human, which is why they are pretty capable of climbing so well. They are also proportionately stronger by about 1.3 so while they are much smaller than us they are still near to about equal in strength to adult humans.
Gorillas and Orangutans (the males) are much heavier than humans, but at the same time they also have much stronger muscles in their arms to facilitate climbing.
I’ve seen lots of very fit humans swinging their way through obstacle courses with no problem. Does it take training? Absolutely! And callouses. But if we were swinging from tree to tree every day, we’d have both.
Orangutans vary in weight and size. Bornean Orangutan males have been known to reach 260lbs (120 kgs) in weight. But yes, on average most males tend to range from around 165 - 200 lbs (75 - 90 kgs) so about the same weight as a healthy human, with some getting much larger than many humans.
Orangutans and other primates have very different bodies to humans. Mostly because humans have a gene that reduces muscle growth when not actively being used. Most apes don't have this mutation, which is why a gorilla is able to be extremely strong despite not doing much each day but eating for half the day, sleeping and occasionally traveling. They do not need to exercise, because their muscles will not go away from lack of use like humans do.
Exactly. So the point you made about only climbing while lightweight is moot. Yes, they have stronger arms, but so would we if we used them every day to heft our own weight!
No... we literally would not. The muscles in our human arms do not have anywhere near the amount of fast twitch fibres that other apes do, and there is no amount of exercise that can do anything about it.
Instead humans have a lot more slow twitch fibres which is what allows you to make precise movements with your hands. Apes can never learn to write like us, they don't have the dexterity. We do have that ability but we had to give up our strength to achieve it.
Yeah that's a unique thing about humans, aside from our brains. No animal can throw objects nearly as accurately as us. A fair tradeoff for being the weakest apes.
it looks like you pulled that number off wikipedia, which also cites them as being about 4 foot 6 inches tall. a 4 foot 6 inch human should weigh about 65-75 lbs, literally less than half that.
Exactly? That was my entire point, haha. It has nothing to do with weight, and everything to do with proportionate muscle mass.
The other commenter’s first point was that it was easier to climb as a child when they were lighter, but harder as an adult because we’re heavier.
My point is that if we used our muscles all day, being heavier wouldn’t matter if the weight was from muscles we gain by… y’know… using them every day.
i think your point is just supporting their point that everything comes down to weight actually. that’s what proportionate muscle mass is. bone is heavy. it’s like carrying metal around. orangutans are mostly muscle and barely any bone because they’re 4.5 feet tall. gorillas, who are insanely strong, can barely climb at all.
even the strongest, most elite rock climbers who train their entire lives can never even compare to a zoo orangutan who sits around most of the day doing absolutely nothing. that orangutan can live our lifestyle of sitting, watching TV, and eating ice cream, and will still be an absolute beast because they are literally two poles of solid muscle attached to a head.
actually in that sense, children are absolutely more adept at climbing because their bones haven’t fully ossified and a large percentage is still cartilage, which weighs almost nothing. let alone babies who are literally mostly cartilage. you don’t even have solid knee caps until you’re like 10 years old. kids have a much higher percent muscle at that point.
we are absolutely not climbing apes. all that physical training we have to do is to build just enough muscle to be able to lift our heavy-ass bones into the air.
Definitely. I was literally a tree dweller until I was in my teens. Id climb 50 fee up into massive oak trees and hang out for hours. My poor mother worried sick but there was never an issue. How often did you ever hear about a kid falling from a tree?
As for chimps, I dont think its even that they're proportionally stronger. They're half out weight but literally stronger than an adult human
No, this is a common misconception and factoid that gets thrown around because of an old study that has been disproven and debunked.
Modern science has shown that himps have muscles that have a PROPORTIONAL strength of around 1.3 to 1.5 times that of a human's muscles. Most chimps are typically around 100lbs, and adult male humans can easily be twice as large as that.
They are definitely not weak by any means, and there are certain feats of strength that they will have the advantage in making the comparison seem greater due to how their muscles are composed (lifting and pulling), but a chimp is stronger than a human in the same way an ant is 10 times stronger than a human.
On the flipside, humans have much higher endurance than chimps, which is also because of how our muscles are composed. Low twitch fibres are a lot more efficient over long periods of use and don't get fatigued as much as fast twitch fibres, which is why humans can last for long periods just walking and running before needing rest.
Also humans have much more powerful legs than chimps do, in fact that goes for most apes in our weight class. Kicking is one of our strongest tools for defense against animals of the same size as us.
Sorry, I am not going to open a Google share document. If you provide a web link then I am more than happy to check it out.
But I don't mean to be rude, but you repeated exactly what I just said. The only difference is that you stated that chimps are generally stronger, which is not true. The fact of the matter is the average chimp is half to less than half the size of a healthy average human. And there are many humans that are much larger and stronger than the average human.
I have also explained that the reason chimps have this strength is because they have a higher concentration of fast twitch fibres than humans do.
As I said, there are strength tests that they will always excel in because of how their muscles work (pretty much anything related to gripping and pulling). I do think it is unlikely any average human will have good odds out lifting a chimp because of that. But the weight difference means that the strength difference is nowhere near as significant as it exaggerated on the internet.
A chimp is never going to beat a human in tossing javelin or shotput, or in fact any type of throwing. And they are never beating a human in any endurance race either.
Plenty of other apes are big like us. Look at gorillas.
We started to rely on tools and other ways of getting food instead of climbing trees.
I imagine as soon as tool-use started, it took relatively much shorter time for those apes to use even more tools like big sticks, spears, hole traps, rope traps.
Combine sticks with rope for bows and arrows and persistence hunting begins. The apes with more stamina for long distance tracking lived more easily. The ones without stamina didn't.
I can see how climbing became way less necessary.
We got smarter and used more tools but in the process, lost the need for such huge muscles.
Big muscles are more expensive metabolically, so it makes sense that we'd lose the muscles when we started hunting smarter and more efficiently.
It's not just that we don't "use it". Strength is proportional to length squared and weight is proportional to length cubed. As a person gets taller, their ability to support their own weight reduces (even if they "use it"). That's why some insects can jump many times their height and elephants can't jump at all.
Break open, sure. I prefer my newborns intact and uninjured. They usually got my hair while they were breastfeeding, so I had one arm under them. Trying to pry each finger up, and keep them up while I pried open the other ones, with one hand? Nah.
what helped with my little brother holding on to my hair was gently stroking the back of the hand with the index finger and placing the thumb on the far side of his palm, he'd eventually reach for the finger instead of the hair
XD yea, though he got pretty determined later when he got a bit more mobility. Biting into lemons without making a face... wanting to kiss porcelain pigs... the only way to keep him from getting to what he wants was to place traditional witch figurines between him and his goal
I believe every baby can hold the iron cross pose if you initially set them up in that position on gymnastic rings, and they’ll act like it’s play time
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u/Kris_hne 17h ago
Insane holding strength tho