How come bears, tigers, even apes are naturally so powerful… And why are humans so weak in comparison
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Horses are able to run at a trot for about 4-ish hours. At a full sprint, they can only run about 2 miles safely.
If the distance is great enough a human is the fastest land creature on earth. People compete against horses in a race (I forgot the name) and regularly win, horses can’t sweat so need to rest whereas we don’t need to stop to cool down.
Humans would (and in some cases still do) chase down animals until they where exhausted and no longer able to run.
Humans are less strong because we made a compromise and traded sone of our strength for dexterity, most apes are much stronger than us because we are not able to ‘tell’ our muscles to push as hard because of the trade off we made to be able to manipulate our movements with greater precision.
Humans can run for hours on end. Marathon runners, over the long term, can outrun horses.
And the thing about proportional is… that’s not always the case. Compared to body weight, an ox isn’t really all that much stronger than a human. Have you never seen someone push a car in neutral? It doesn’t take very much strength.
You’re picking a few specific examples of especially exceptional animals. Humans are faster than sloths, stronger than slugs, we’re better than a ton of animals. For pretty much any metric you can find a specialized animal better at that thing than humans are, but you can also find a ton more that are worse.
Much stronger, not much more stronger. Much stronger, not much more stronger.
Much stronger, not much more stronger. Much stronger, not much more stronger.
This subreddit made me make this explanation much longer than necessary.
But also, Much stronger, not much more stronger.
A big factor in this is our evolution of fine motor skills favored over gross motor skills. Like, a chimpanzee can rip your arm off but struggles with tiny things. Our evolution of tool use into finer and finer tools likely factors into this.
A few things not touched upon:
Proportional strength: Smaller animals, for their size, can be stronger. Like if you took a ferrari engine and stuck it in a go kart that thing would fly (or rip itself apart) but if you put that in a semi 18-wheeler it might barely move forward. For the same amount of muscle, smaller animals are stronger which is why you get those “ants can lift 100 times their weight” kind of factoids.
Muscle Composition: Basically there are two types of muscle fibers: high yield and low yield. High yield gives you power, low yield gives you endurance. Different animals have different mixtures in their muscles which is why even the same amount of “muscle” might yield very different strengths. An adult orangutan weighs about the same as a human but is about x7 stronger.
Strength Limiters: Muscles have built in limiters that prevent them from being used too hard that can cause damage. Things like adrenaline can “unlock” those limits which is why you see people lifting cars or boulders because of adrenaline. You don’t suddenly hulk up, but your muscles suddenly can exert a lot more power in the short term at the expense of shredding your ligaments and supporting structure in the long term. Yeah people can lift cars but then when its all said and done and the adrenaline wears off they find that they’ve pulled every muscle in their upper body.
I remember reading about a climber who had to dislodge a massive boulder that had pinned his leg and he said after the adrenaline wore off he could barely move because of how much pain his upper body was in from the stress/damage he had done due to adrenaline strength surge.
Different animals have different kinds of connective tissues and support structures that can allow them to use their muscles harder without causing long term damage like a human would. In the case of the organutang I don’t know for sure but this might also be a difference.
Physical Layout: Muscle power is heavily dependent on physics and by using/abusing physics you can do specific things in different ways. Some animals are very specialized in certain tasks and their muscles are built and connected in different ways to hyper-specialize. A crocodile closing its jaws is MUCH stronger than opening them. The pistol shrimp has a claw that can close at supersonic speeds to stun its prey.
Muscle Mass: Cows, Bears, Tigers, and Gorillas are much much larger than humans in terms of muscle mass. A female tiger for example might only be about 6’6″ which puts it on par with a large human but will probably weight x2 or x3 times as much. While proportionally smaller animals are stronger by weight, in reality bigger = more muscle = stronger…just not quite as efficiently as small animals.
Because we can create weapons, clothes, shelter. Also our brain power can create complex language and social system. Further increases the power of the group and decision making. An ape when sees a lion can only say “lion!” to their friends. But a human using its languages can tell how big the lion is, where it is located at, where it is hiding, what to do, planning, etc.
Horses, in general, are not capable of running for hours on end. Yes, they are fast, but they run in short bursts, just like any other ungulate out there.
It’s why humans succeeded so fantastically as persistence hunters: while we cannot run very fast, we _can_ run for much longer than horses or deer, allowing us to “run them down” into exhaustion.
Even during the Pony Express, said riders switched horses every 10-15 miles. The horses weren’t generally able to go further at full tilt without needing dramatically longer recovery periods. Meanwhile humans can go 50-100km without stopping, and some ultramarathoners have been able to go up to 560km in 80 hours without needing to rest or sleep.
Watch this. This is of people running over 100 miles straight in 24 hours for fun. Imagine what the body could do if our whole life was trained around it. I’d say we’re very strong.
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned in the answers is that to have all this intelligence takes a lot of calories. The brain burns 320 calories a day in the average person. That means that in order for our species to survive in the hunter/gatherer phase, we needed to cut energy demands elsewhere. Having the muscle structure of a lion or bear would have required more calories and then our brains would have evolved differently, with less horsepower for thinking.
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