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[Josh Greenman <josh.greenman AT gmail.com>]

http://www.slate.com/id/2212232/

How Strong Is a Chimpanzee?

The bone-crushing power of the apes has been greatly exaggerated.

By John Hawks

Posted Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2009, at 3:43 PM ET

After last week's chimpanzee attack in Connecticut, in which an animal
named Travis tore off the face of a middle-aged woman, primate experts
interviewed by the media repeated an old statistic: Chimpanzees are
five to eight times stronger than people. The literature—or at least
19th-century literature—concurs: Edgar Allan Poe's fictional orangutan
was able to hurl bodies and pull off scalps. Edgar Rice Burroughs'
fictional anthropoid apes were likewise possessed of remarkable
strength. Even Jules Verne's gentle ape, Jupiter, had the muscle to
drag a stuck wagon from the mire.

Pulled scalps? Unstuck wagons? No doubt, chimpanzees are different
from us. Their climbing lifestyle accentuates the need for arm
strength. A chimp on four legs can easily outrun a world-class human
sprinter. But it sounds extreme to suggest that humans are only an
eighth as strong as chimpanzees. Consider that a large human can
bench-press 250 pounds. If the "five to eight times" figure were true,
that would make a large chimpanzee capable of bench-pressing 1 ton.
It's just the sort of factoid the zoo staff might tell you to keep you
from knocking on the glass.

The suspicious claim seems to have originated in a flapper-era study
conducted by a biologist named John Bauman. Poe's story of the
scalp-pulling orangutan struck Bauman as being "grotesquely
impossible." In 1923, he noted that every expert in the field believed
apes were vastly stronger than humans—yet none had ever tried to prove
it. So he packed up a device used to measure pull strength, called a
dynamometer, and set out for the Bronx Zoo.

The apes were less-than-willing participants in the study. They were
more apt to tear apart the shiny dynamometer than pull on it, and,
unless the ape had a "distinctly vicious disposition," she was
unlikely to approach the experimental task with much vigor. Bauman
managed to rig his device outside the cage, feeding in a rope for the
apes to work on. Then, amazingly, one of the Bronx chimpanzees—a
former circus ape named Suzette—managed to pull 1,260 pounds.

Bauman took his study on the road, attempting tests at the
Philadelphia Zoo and making inquiries as far afield as Chicago and
Cincinnati. In 1926, he returned to the Bronx Zoo, successfully
testing the largest chimpanzee then in captivity. That animal, named
Boma, pulled 847 pounds one-handed.

How did that compare with humans? As a college teacher in South
Dakota, Bauman did what any good scientist would do: He recruited the
football team as research subjects. He found that not one of his
"husky lads" could pull more than 500 pounds with both hands, and only
one had a one-handed pull above 200. What's more, the football players
were free to use the dynamometer as they wished, while the chimpanzees
had been forced to pull the apparatus from a clumsy posture in their
cages. It appeared that chimpanzees really could be more than five
times stronger than humans.

Thus the number entered the anthropology textbooks and made its way
into the talking points of recent primatologists like Jane Goodall and
Sue Savage-Rumbaugh.

But the "five times" figure was refuted 20 years after Bauman's
experiments. In 1943, Glen Finch of the Yale primate laboratory rigged
an apparatus to test the arm strength of eight captive chimpanzees. An
adult male chimp, he found, pulled about the same weight as an adult
man. Once he'd corrected the measurement for their smaller body sizes,
chimpanzees did turn out to be stronger than humans—but not by a
factor of five or anything close to it.

Repeated tests in the 1960s confirmed this basic picture. A chimpanzee
had, pound for pound, as much as twice the strength of a human when it
came to pulling weights. The apes beat us in leg strength, too,
despite our reliance on our legs for locomotion. A 2006 study found
that bonobos can jump one-third higher than top-level human athletes,
and bonobo legs generate as much force as humans nearly two times
heavier.

So the figures quoted by primate experts are a little exaggerated. But
it is a fact that chimpanzees and other apes are stronger than humans.
How did we get to be the weaklings of the primate order? Our overall
body architecture makes a difference: Even though chimpanzees weigh
less than humans, more of their mass is concentrated in their powerful
arms. But a more important factor seems to be the structure of the
muscles themselves. A chimpanzee's skeletal muscle has longer fibers
than the human equivalent and can generate twice the work output over
a wider range of motion. In the past few years, geneticists have
identified the loci for some of these anatomical differences. One
gene, for example, called MYH16, contributes to the development of
large jaw muscles in other apes. In humans, MYH16 has been
deactivated. (Puny jaws have marked our lineage for as least 2 million
years.) Many people have also lost another muscle-related gene called
ACTN3. People with two working versions of this gene are
overrepresented among elite sprinters while those with the nonworking
version are overrepresented among endurance runners. Chimpanzees and
all other nonhuman primates have only the working version; in other
words, they're on the powerful, "sprinter" end of the spectrum.

We're still left to wonder how Bauman managed to be so far off in his
calculations. The biologist himself thought that his subjects'
agitation contributed to their exceptional pulls—like an
adrenaline-charged mother lifting a bus off her newborn. Later
scientists tended to focus on his clumsy measurement procedure. In any
case, a modern and accurate comparison of human and chimpanzee
strength still has meaning for scientists. By studying the
evolutionary changes that made us so much wimpier than our cousins, we
may be able to develop new approaches for the treatment of human
muscle disorders. We won't be infusing the elderly with chimpanzee
strength any time soon, but a little boost here and there for those
who need it? That's hardly science fiction.

John Hawks is an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
who specializes in human evolution and genetics. He maintains an
anthropology weblog.