referring to this column
Humans and chimps have a common ancestor. And I would have guessed increased strength would provide a survival advantage for both. So why the difference in their evolution? Just chance? Or was their some benefit to humans in not getting that strong?
First, additional strength comes with costs, such as loss of manual dexterity, or ability to stand upright, or requiring more food to support. Secondly, increased strength may not convey any survival advantage if your rely on group coordination, cursorial hunting, or tools and agricultural. How much strength do you need to harvest a carrot?
Traits like additional strength aren’t a help or a hurt until you look at the environment. And that can change over time; being large helped some dinosaurs until the environment changed and they couldn’t. A human most important tool is his/her brain. It was much more advantageous to follow the route of communication, coordination and invention instead of trying to out-compete other animals by strength.
I’ve heard that as speculation before, but has anyone every proved it ?
The other theory I’ve heard is that we lost the strength for the same reason domestic animals tend to be stupider than wild ones : dependency upon our intelligence. When a faculty is unused, genetic drift tends to cause it to wither; like with cave fish and their eyes.
I recall a show about Neanderthals on Discovery that said that while Homo Neanderthalis was quite muscular and an effective hunter in groups, Homo Sapiens were more adept at storing body fat, which gave them an advantage during lean times and in certain habitats.
As for chimps, you’d be pretty muscular yourself if you used your arms as much as they do. And their 90 pound frame has very little fat on it.
I’ve read (no cites, sorry) that a lot of it has to do with leverage. A chimp’s muscles attach much further away from the joint than ours do. This means that, for any given muscle contraction, the force on the end is increased at the expense of distance. Which makes chimps excellent for tearing, pulling, and lifting, but horrible at throwing.
That little bastard at the Little Rock Zoo nailed Mrs. Plant. Fortunately all he had was a dirt clod. Of course, he may have been aiming at one of the hecklers…
More leverage, with reduced speed and range of motion. Human physiology is much more versatile.
Perhaps I misunderstand, but I would think they would be able to throw better, like a spear thrower, or those things Mrs. Plant uses to throw tennis balls for her dogs.
Sort of the opposite. Those devices use a relatively long resistance arm, for speed and range of motion at the expense of force; a chimp’s arms have a relatively short resistance arm, for force at the expense of speed and range of motion.
ETA: It’s a lot easier to explain and understand this stuff with diagrams, and especially animation. I can’t look at work, but I bet there’s something on YouTube that applies.
to demonstrate this, try opening/closing a door by pushing near the hinges vs. pushing near the handle (furthest away from the hinges). You could even have a “contest” between a child pushing at the handle, and an adult pushing near the hinges (on the opposite side of the door), and I’m betting the child would win.
Now try to whether you can open the door faster by pushing near the middle, or by pushing near the handle/edge.
I thought from the post that chimps had longer arms rather than shorter.
So can we outrun chimps? That would make them much less dangerous–at least on open ground.
I can’t find a good cite that gives hard numbers, but chimps are much faster than we are over short distances. Most of the links I’ve found are more interested in examining whether walking upright gives humans an endurance advantage over walking quadrupedally. Best link I can find (trying to compare chimps to a model of how A. afarensis may have moved):
And here’s a prime example of why you don’t wanna mess with a chimp:
As a visual aid describing how the higher apes screw us for brute strength, one of those Fox “Man vs Beast” programs show a sumo wrestler against an orangutan in a tug-o-war. The orang toyed with the human disinterstedly for a few minutes before she got the cue, then nonchalantedly pulled him off his perch. But she climbs to her bedroom with her arms. We use our legs.
FTR, a zebra running against an Olympic sprinter kicked with both hind legs before the finish to show he was less than shit running against him. Wild animals have tudes.
How much would that have to do with modern man’s more relaxed lifestyle and use of tools? (A human hunter surely doesn’t need to run that fast; an accurately thrown spear can move so much faster.)
How do chimps compare with olympic sprinters for example?
He doesn’t have to run faster than the sabre tooth tiger, just faster than one of his fellow hunters.
They’re biters, for sure. Washoe, the famous chimp who allegedly can communicate at a high level using Ameslan, bit a neurosurgeon’s finger off.
Ah! Did they ask him why?
It’s had to sign with a missing finger, I’d guess.
Depends on which one.