Phrased another way, how fragile are humans when compared to other animals? I know it’s a difficult comparison, since animals evolve in order to adapt themselves to their environment, but is it possible to determine whether humans are tougher than, say, a cheetah or a horse?
Out of the 30 million or so species estimated to exist on the planet right now, perhaps you could narrow down just a bit which ones you’d like to be compared to?
Also, define “tough”.
Tough enough to survive long enough to breed, enough, so far.
What got me thinking about this subject was a bug in my apartment the other week that managed to survive several direct hits with a shoe before finally going down on the fourth or fifth hit. Son in terms of toughness I’m thinking of the ability to withstand injury or overcome disease. As for comparisons to other animals, I suppose the easiest comparison would be to a mammal that was roughly the weight of an average human.
We have medicine. We win, hands down.
You have to pick your criteria carefully. Cheetahs have remarkably little genetic variation and they don’t breed easily especially in captivity so they could be wiped out by a single widespread disease. The same isn’t true isn’t true for humans. Cheetahs aren’t generally aggressive towards people either and have been kept as pets for thousands of years so you you can’t even really say that a cheetah is ‘tougher’ because it could kill just about any person. They could easily chase anyone down but they generally don’t have the will to fight let alone kill people so that is out.
You would have to set your criteria and go species by species. I would say that wolves and many working dog breeds are ‘tougher’ than people. They can live in any habitat that people can and do just fine in subzero temperatures day after day. After a nice night’s sleep on a pile of ice, they will still be happy to pull you and all your stuff on a sled through miles of frozen tundra at a near sprint while smiling the whole time. They breed easily and can defend themselves well without weapons especially as part of a pack.
I’d say compared to a lot of other mammals we are pretty fragile physically.
As someone mentioned above, dogs are amazing at adapting to temperatures. Our dog can go from inside (70 F) to outside in the winter (20 F) for hours while wearing the same coat and he doesn’t seem to mind it one bit. No shivering or anything. I have to bundle up like I am going to freeze to death.
I remember shooting squirrels as a kid with a .22 and them jumping and running quite a ways. For a human, that’s like getting hit with a 25mm shell or larger and then getting up and running 100 yards or so.
I know what you mean about sometimes encountering an animal (bug or whatever) that Just Won’t Die. I always feel bad about killing them in the end because they apparently have such a strong will to live.
Humans are good at shedding heat and so can remain active at higher temperatures than most mammals.
Also, we breed readily in captivity.
I’d say we injure pretty easily. We don’t have very tough skin compared to other animals of similar size, and lack a protective cover of fur. Simply tripping on rough ground will likely draw blood on the knees/elbows and palms. Simple lacerations aren’t a big deal for us now, but infection is a much bigger concern in more primitive circumstances. If you put a naked, 200 lb man sans tools in a cage match with just about any other 200 lb animal, he’s probably going to come out pretty cut up.
That said, we have amazing endurance and can run far enough to literally chase large animals to death. And with even the most basic first aid we have the ability to nurse ourselves back to health in ways that no other animal can. A broken leg in any other mammal is basically a death sentence, whereas humans can set the bone and rely on the help of the others in his/her group while it heals. Ditto with many diseases: most sick animals have to worry about dying from the disease AND being picked off by a predator in their weakened state, humans can have their friends both protect them and nurse them back to health.
So with just his birthday suit I’d say a human isn’t terribly tough. But give him a few friends, some sticks, rope, and cloth, and he’s pretty resilient.
You can’t just scale up the size and speed of the bullet; the bigger bullet would do far more damage than a simple upscaling would indicate because of factors like tensile strength of tissues (similar between humans and squirrels).
Just like how a bug can survive a 100 foot drop without injury but a human would be killed; bugs don’t hit the ground hard enough (low terminal velocity and mass) to damage vital organs.
Up until the Industrial Revolution and the advent of high speed travel humans were pretty sturdy in most situations. Watch how bull riders in rodeos get tossed about & stomped and usually come away with only minor injuries. The reason automobiles kill so many people is because even at modest speeds (less than 30MPH) it exposes the human body to blunt force trauma at levels that are many magnitudes above anything it has evolved to endure.
I bet I could easily survive getting hit with a shoe five times.
Many animals can survive subzero temperatures, but they’re adapted to them. Remember that humans are a tropical species; in fact, even for a tropical species, we’re adapted for shedding heat. It’s very useful for endurance hunting on a scorching savannah, but a liability where there’s snow on the ground. Luckily for us, we’re as adept at fashioning clothing and building fires as we are at migrating.
It isn’t fair to compare us (post-)modern folks to wild animals. Sure, we have soft skins and can’t take a hit, but primitive people were much tougher. Any number of ethnographic accounts depict hunter-gatherers, herders and subsistence farmers who live their lives barefoot on rough terrain, semi-naked in cool climate, doing stuff with their bodies that would break ours.
Even more unfair is putting a naked guy into a cage match against a man-sized animal, unless the animal is de-clawed and de-toothed first. We are how we are because we have always used tools for most everything, including fighting animals.
Unlike almost all animals we can kill at a distance, our shoulders allow us to basically make any thing, a rock, a large log, a weapon. I do not think any animal has the sweat glands that we do. Which permits us to have great endurance.
Well, clearly, resilient enough.
Some of us are super-resilient. I saw Bruce Willis drop 100’ from a bridge onto the steel deck of a ship, land with an ‘oof’ and then go about his one-man-army business.
The special part about dogs and wolves isn’t just that they can survive very cold temperatures. They can of course but they can also adapt to any environment where people can live. Some dog breeds are bred to be more suited to some environments than other but wolves or a typical mutt can easily live in environments with temperature differences of over 100 degrees with no clothing changes required. It is the range of environments that they can survive and thrive in without the aid of technology that makes them ‘tougher’ than people in some ways and it is not typical for the vast majority of other animals either.
Since you ask about horses, I read in a Scientific American article that humans can walk further than horses on a hot day, due in part to our ability to sweat. Apparently we evolved to hunt by pursuing large prey relentlessly, not fast, but for longer than they can stand it. We are pretty good at walking, and of course are larger than the great majority of other animals.