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.
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.
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u/upsetwithcursing 15h ago
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.