Ever felt so intimidated by the apes in Planet of the Apes movie series and had recurring nightmares of getting reduced to a savage state and spending the rest of your life servicing these creatures with scary sharp teeth?
No?!
Okay just me then.
Apes are the most powerful of all primates, and we humans have always been considered the weakest among the lot. Even chimpanzees, who are considerably smaller than us have been considered way more stronger.
Scientists have now disproved this lore and finally relieved the great mystery of how these little chimps could pack such impressive punch in their tiny bodies.
The answer is that they do not!
Contrary to popular belief, our ape cousins definitely possess decent amount of strength and are slightly stronger than us but do not exactly have super human strength by our standards.
This modest difference is attributable not to their physical traits or any newly-discovered dedication to bench presses and dead-lifts, but instead, to how the fibers in chimp muscles are distributed.
In order to determine why chimps seem so much stronger than humans—at least on a pound-for-pound basis— a team of researchers at the University of Arizona College of Medicine
in Phoenix biopsied the thigh and calf muscles of three chimps. They then dissected the samples into individual fibers and stimulated them to figure out how much force they could generate. Later the researchers compared the same to preexisting data from humans, and found that at the single fiber level, muscle output was more or less the same.In a step forward, the team decided to conduct a more thorough analysis. And this time around, they used tissue samples from pelvic and hind limb muscles of three chimpanzee cadavers and applied gel electrophoresis to break down the muscles into individual muscle fibers, and compared this to the human set.
The results were quite astonishing, what was found was that whereas human muscle contains, on an average, about 70% slow-twitch fibers and 30% fast-twitch fibers, the chimpanzee muscle muscles consisted of about 33% slow-twitch fibers and 66% fast-twitch fibers.
This proves that chimpanzees are only 1.5 times stronger than humans at pulling and jumping tasks!
Although the news is exhilarating, there are other factors to consider- such as the study’s evolutionary ramifications, and the data of the chimps’ upper limb that were not interpreted.
