Fights are listed chronologically.Ĭase Study #1: Chimpanzee v. Also, it should be mentioned that I����m not a zoologist, so I may confuse the proper title of certain animals. I picked detailed newspaper stories and skipped short ones. When attacked, humans seem to have an uncanny ability to make a weapon out of anything.įinally, there was no scientific methodology involved in writing this article. Although I would have preferred to use only stories with hand-to-hand combat, there weren����t enough available. I disregarded articles with multiple combatants, as well as those where humans used a firearm. I looked at nine of these news stories to see if they could validate my belief that a human would be able to defeat a primate in combat. Hence the wealth of news stories about human-primate fights. Monkeys were cheaper, mistreated, and they escaped more often in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This likely owed to European colonization of areas with monkeys, insufficient safety measures at zoos and circuses, and fewer government and private organizations to ensure that animals were properly caged and well treated. I did, however, discover that newspapers in the late 1800s and early 1900s were chock full of stories about monkeys attacking humans. If a human has ever fought a primate in controlled setting, I didn����t find it. I����ve run across accounts of humans wrestling lions and boxing kangaroos. With a contemporary tournament out of the question, I decided to see if a circus promoter had ever put on a fight between a human and a chimpanzee. Even if it would answer one of the greatest questions of all time. We should never see animals fight for our amusement or curiosity. Even if you did get a monkey in a cage, the ASPCA and Humane Society would shut the event down in a heartbeat. No one would put his or her chimp in a fight. In addition, monkeys are expensive and most are loving companions to their owners. It����d be a meth-head who wouldn����t last thirty seconds against a primate. If somehow you convinced someone to fight, it wouldn����t be Larry Allen or Brock Lesnar. No one is stupid enough to step into a cage with a monkey. If the primates won more than 80 percent of the time, the few human victories could be disregarded as flukes.Īs we all know, this tournament will never happen. This world would be horrible.), we would have a tournament where we����d stick 100 of our toughest humans into cages with primates����gorillas, baboons, chimpanzees����and if the humans incapacitated their opponents with some level of consistency����say 20 percent of the time����then yes, a human could defeat a primate in a fight. Here����s the thing: there����s no way of knowing if I����m right or wrong. He����d look even tougher without the phallic knife. Lesnar could just fall on the monkey and hold it until it exhausted its energy. To me, someone like 280-pound former UFC Heavyweight Champion Brock Lesnar could take down and incapacitate a male chimpanzee weighing 150 pounds at least�� some��of the time. In spite of these news stories and scientific studies, I����ve always felt that a human could beat a primate in a fight. Because of these results, scientists concluded that evolution had bestowed intelligence upon humans. There����s also the famous study from the Bronx Zoo where scientists tested the strength of chimpanzee against football players and found that the primate could pull five times the amount of weight as his human counterparts. It seems like every year a story comes out about a chimpanzee maiming or killing their owner. Humans, as the argument goes, would not be as ferocious.Ĭountless news stories and a handful of scientific studies back up the primate proponents. Perhaps the most common bullet point in favor of a primate is that monkeys and apes don����t give a sh*t. Primates are five times stronger than humans, they����re faster, they have sharp claws and canine teeth that can be used as weapons, and they have thick skulls, making it hard to knock them out. So what was being asked on the radio was, ����with no weapons or technology, could a human at their peak strength and size beat a primate in hand-to-hand combat?���� Would the human stand a chance?Īs I learned when I posed this question to friends and coworkers, most people believe that a primate����be it chimpanzee, baboon, or ape����would make quick work of a human in a fight.
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