The Ape That Rips Off Human Hands
For a century people said a chimpanzee is five times stronger than a human. When scientists finally measured it, the answer was closer to 1.35 times — yet a 200-pound pet chimp still tore off a woman's hands and face.
The Ape That Rips Off Human Hands
In February 2009, in Stamford, Connecticut, a 200-pound pet chimpanzee named Travis attacked a woman named Charla Nash. By the time police arrived and shot the animal, he had torn off her hands, her nose, her lips and her eyelids, broken most of the bones in her face and left her blind. She later received a full face transplant.
Not an Unusual Animal
Travis was a house pet, raised around people. What he did was extreme, but the capacity for it is ordinary for his species. Wild chimpanzees hunt red colobus monkeys, and in Gombe National Park researchers recorded hundreds of kills over a decade. They catch the monkeys with their hands and pull them apart. Adult and adolescent males do almost all of the killing.
The Five-Times Legend
For nearly a century the popular claim was that a chimpanzee is several times stronger than a human, often quoted as five times. The story goes back to strength tests in the 1920s, and it stuck because it matched what people saw: an animal much smaller than a man that could not be restrained by one.
What the Measurement Said
In 2017 a team led by Matthew O’Neill published a direct comparison in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They measured the force and power of chimpanzee muscle fibres against human ones. The difference was real but modest: chimpanzee muscle produces about 1.35 times the dynamic force and power of human muscle of the same size. Roughly a third stronger, not five times.
Where the Third Comes From
The gap is not in the fibres themselves. Individual muscle cells in chimps and humans perform almost identically. The difference is the mix. Human muscle is around 70 percent slow-twitch fibre, built for endurance and long walks. Chimpanzee muscle is around two-thirds fast-twitch, roughly twice the human proportion. Fast-twitch fibre is built for short, explosive effort: one violent pull rather than a long march.
Still Enough
A third more power than a person, delivered all at once by an animal with no instinct to hold back, is enough. The legend was wrong about the number. It was not wrong about the outcome.
