![]() Muscle fibres tend to come in two varieties – slow-twitch and fast-twitch, each of which with its own characteristic pattern of myosin chains. ![]() They also examined the tissue's distribution of 'motor proteins' called myosin. To put this number to the test and discover why chimp muscles were stronger than ours, the team isolated muscle fibres and tested their overall force and velocity as they contracted. That still doesn't make it a good idea to get into a wrestling match with one. ![]() So keeping this in mind, a team of US researchers dug deeper into the wealth of research conducted between 19 and came to the conclusion that a more accurate interpretation of the data is that while chimpanzees are consistently stronger, they are on average only about 1.5 times stronger than us. "There are nearly 100 years of accounts suggesting that chimpanzees must have intrinsically superior muscle fibre properties compared with humans, yet there had been no direct tests of that idea," says Brian Umberger from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. This makes it hard to separate the effects of muscle arrangement, the contributions of tendons, or the effect of overall body shape from the actual strength of the muscles. Since the 1920s, the notion of chimpanzees possessing phenomenal strength has been a feature of pop-culture and a common subject for study in biology.Ī number of studies across the decades have suggested that pound-for-pound, chimpanzees could be as much as 3 to nearly 5 times stronger than a strapping human, or as little as 2.5 times.Įven recent conservative calculations place their relative strength at around double our own, but most of the studies have been based on a chimp trying to move a heavy mass, and then having a human do the same thing. It also turns out that the secret to their superior strength isn't stronger muscle fibres, as suspected, but a specific ratio of different kinds of muscle tissues, providing insight into how our respective bodies evolved.
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