Recent comments in /f/gifs

Doomquill t1_iuq44q9 wrote

Reply to comment by tatakatakashi in Nice Catch! by westondeboer

There's multiple reasons, from lower mass leading to fewer injuries when falling to different shapes being more robust.

Possibly the biggest one relevant to us is that human bodies aren't built to take a fall. We are great apes, but we descended from the trees a long time ago, and our body shape has changed dramatically to adapt to our vertical, ground-running lifestyle. We are incredibly well adapted to run long distances, actually ludicrous distances by animal standards. We're persistence predators; before we invented sharp sticks we killed things by just running behind them until they died of exhaustion, then carrying the corpse back home.

Also it should be noted that that fall probably did hurt the orangutan, but what's he gonna do? Lie down and whine about it? Most animals even when badly hurt will try to get back up immediately because injury often means danger, predators, and you gotta get your ass out of there and lick your wounds somewhere safe.

60