The finding is independent of body size and instead concerns the physical property of individual muscle fibers, O'Neill said. The price of that power, though, is that chimps and other apes tire more easily and cannot walk great distances to find food - or, for that matter, to find new lands and make new discoveries. The researchers' computer simulations revealed that these differences in muscle characteristics increase the maximum dynamic force and power-producing capacity of chimpanzees by a factor of 1.35 compared to humans. This variant enables slower twitching, or contracting, which is important for endurance and energy conservation. But human muscles are dominated by the MHC I variant. Chimp muscles contain a balanced mixed of three variants of a protein called MHC: I, IIa and IId.
However, human skeletal muscles differ in fiber length and protein composition, the study found. The researchers found that the so-called contractile properties of human and chimpanzee skeletal muscle fibers - that is, how muscle fibers pull two joints together to enable the body to lift or move - are similar. "One of the advantages of our approach is that we avoid all the complexities involved in trying to elicit maximal performance from a chimpanzee of unknown motivation or interest, and instead gets right to the measurement of the muscle tissue," O'Neill told Live Science.
Then, the group compared the skeletal muscles under a microscope. O'Neill's group reviewed even more recent, laboratory-controlled studies on chimpanzee mass-specific muscle performance and found that, on average, the animals outperformed humans by a factor of approximately 1.5 in tasks involving pulling and jumping. The "five times stronger" figure stuck for decades until more modern studies in the 1960s refined the estimation to about two times stronger. One particular chimpanzee, named Suzette, supposedly pulled 1,260 lbs.(572 kg) in a fit of rage, which was nearly 10 times her body weight, although no other study has recorded anything close to that show of strength.
Chimpanzee fight series#
In a series of studies later revealed to have poor methodology, Bauman found that chimps could pull weights five times heavier than the beefiest college football players could. The notion that chimpanzees and other apes have superhuman strength dates back first to tall tales from European explorers in sub-Saharan Africa in the early 19th century and then to research in the 1920s by biologist John Bauman, who studied chimps in zoos. Therefore, it has been difficult to accurately compare strength between the two primates. Adult chimps are generally smaller than adult humans on average, the apes weigh about 100 lbs. This greater number of slow-twitch fibers may have evolved because it gave early humans the advantage of being able to travel long distances and forage, and allowed them to rely less on powerful movements for survival and fitness, O'Neill said.įor years, scientists have suspected that chimpanzees are more powerful than humans, but that suspicion was based largely on anecdotal evidence. "We can … do things like run marathons, unlike chimpanzees." "Previous studies have shown that slow fibers are more fatigue resistant and less costly to contract than fast fibers," O'Neill said.
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