OK I assume the hypothetical implies either the humans are bare handed or that the gorrilla also gets a weapon.
Though, outside of hammers and swords I don’t think that really gives the Gorrila much of an advantage…
tbf, 100 unarmed men vs. a gorilla is probably about the same difficulty level as 20 men armed with literal sticks vs. a mammoth
Don’t underestimate the power of a pointy stick. Whatever size advantage the beast may have, it’s not going to be able to simply ignore stab wounds.
Look at it this way, if you were naked and unarmed, and a dozen or more little imps as tall as your knee started stabbing at you from all angles with spears that can easily rupture your vital organs, how brave would you be to charge at them and try to kill them all with your bare hands?
Visualizing this made me think twice, even trice
Strong disagree. The sheer maneuverability advantage a gorilla has (over a mammoth) makes it considerably harder for unarmed fighters. A reach weapon that you can poke at the mammoth’s ass, forcing it to run and exert itself on defense. I don’t think the mammoth is killing as many humans as the gorilla, or even a proportional amount.
My only source for fighting animals is my experience fending off a wild dog. But tell me I’m wrong, I want to hear why so I can counterpoint.
Disclaimer: I’ve never fought a gorilla, or obviously a mammoth.
I’d believe it if someone told me a grown human could survive a glancing blow from a gorilla. If he has his focus on you then yeah you’re fucked, but if he’s surrounded by 30 guys with 70 more waiting to reinforce, his attention is probably going to be a bit scattered.
If you get hit by anything on a mammoth, either kicked or tusked, by sheer difference of mass I expect you’re out of that fight. One good trampling tantrum might take out 20 guys who are trying to be in melee range. Mammoth is going to burn through the reinforcements a lot faster I think.
If we’re allowed to throw the spears though this might change the entire fight, for both fights.
I don’t understand why it would change the unarmed gorilla fight? But yes I would assume throwing the spears is almost certainly the most common tactic tbh.
Edit: but also we are talking about spears. If attacking from behind, at spear range, I don’t think a mammoth has opportunity for a trample attack. They would certainly need to swing around and attack with their tusks, giving attackers ample time to back up.
Also, looking into it, I can’t find any videos of an elephant kicking behind itself. I’m not sure that it has any way of defending its backside. I assume mammoths are similar.
They can turn remarkably fast.
Not fast enough.
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You’re arguing with me about something I don’t believe in.
100 unarmed men body a gorilla.
I’m saying I think a gorilla could kill a higher number of unarmed humans than a mammoth could kill of armed humans.
People seem to have this vision of gorillas as raging murder beasts, but nothing could be further from the truth. Frankly, I don’t think a gorilla definitively wins even 10 on 1. 100 on 1, the poor gorilla doesn’t stand a chance.
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I always assumed the 100 men vs gorilla question was meant with no weapons.
If you give the 100 men weapons, the gorilla is dead real fast. Making and using weapons is what put us at the top of the food chain.
…with weapons? Of course.
Unarmed? Fuck, no.
Unarmed? Absolutely. Humans are uniquely capable harassers. A gorilla would get winded after a short while and overheat not long after. The question isn’t whether the humans win, the question is how many people will die before the people start getting free shots at a barely conscious horizontal ape.
Unless the gorilla is windmill arming and people are just walking into the grinder, it’s always a win.
Really? And what exactly is a human naturally equipped with, that can do any kind of damage to a gorilla? Lol!
I don’t mean to be crass, but how does a hyena begin eating an antelope?
Lol! Are you suggesting that a human could do actual damage to a gorilla…by biting it?
A hyena has long, sharp teeth and a bite strength that can crush bone. Humans regularly break their teeth eating candy.
To answer my question, by forcing its head inside of the antelope and pulling its entrails from its live body.
Lol! I take it back. That might just work.
Touch the eyes, bite the balls, and lick the ears, of course.
Lol! Wet Willy it to death? Hmmm. You might be into something, there.
Fingers, arms and teeth?
Assuming the gorilla was successfully exhausted, you can continuously rip fur from it. Or you can bite it - human teeth and our jaw muscle are strong enough to go reasonably deep. That takes a lot of time though.
Or, provided you are able to coordinate properly, 10 people can hold down the exhausted gorilla which would allow the remaining people to strangle it by sitting on his neck or something. The jaw could probably be held shut by a single person since jaw muscles suck at opening the jaw.
All we would do, is break our hands, feet and teeth trying to do any kind of damage. Meanwhile, a gorilla can crush your skull with a single swat, or break your femur by simply squeezing and twisting its wrist. It wouldn’t even require enough energy to eventually get exhausted.
No one is saying that you’re just chucking a Gorilla and a Human/group of humans into a ring.
if the human/humans know that they will be fighting a Gorilla then they can fashion weapons and strategies.
A single human could easily kill a gorilla if they could choose the time and place of the engagement.
It’s how we became the dominant species on the planet
The premise is and has always been 100 unarmed humans (I think men, specifically).
That is exactly what everyone has been saying the whole time. 100 unarmed humans in a ring with 1 gorilla.
I’ve not heard
unarmedbeing specified. but that’s not how humans fight.You could start unarmed and then improvise a weapon
Right, I don’t know how you missed it, it’s been unarmed the whole time. It’s built into the premise of the original viral post.
It’s a hypothetical. What you’re saying right now doesn’t matter. The hypothetical premise has always been “unarmed”. Look it up lol.
Edit: i looked it up and cannot find the “original hypothetical premise” I claimed existed, so, fuck me.
That being said… yeah. One man with a weapon bodies a gorilla. People are so fucking stupid.
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Exactly. Weapons are required.
Unarmed? Fuck, no.
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I don’t use YouTube and you’re taking a theoretical exercise very seriously. The reason people debate this question is because there is no definitive right answer.
Maybe take a couple deep breaths and calm down.
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Last time this made the rounds I asked ChatGPT the question.
Tap for spoiler
In a realistic, unarmed, hand-to-hand fight, 100 average human men would almost certainly lose to a fully grown adult male silverback gorilla — unless they approached it with extreme coordination, strategy, and sacrifice.
Here’s why:
🦍 Gorilla Advantages: Strength: A silverback gorilla is 4 to 9 times stronger than a trained adult male human. It can lift over 1,800 lbs (800+ kg) in some cases. Speed & Reflexes: Gorillas are incredibly fast and agile for their size. They can run up to 20–25 mph (32–40 km/h) in short bursts. Toughness: Their bones are denser, their muscles thicker, and they can absorb more trauma than a human. Killing Power: They can crush limbs, rip faces, and bite with over 1,300 psi of jaw force — enough to crush a coconut or break bone. 👨 Human Limitations: Average Men: Most people are not trained fighters, and many would hesitate or flee. Unarmed: No tools, no weapons, no armor. That means no ranged attacks or serious damage dealers. Space Constraint: In a tight area, humans can’t swarm effectively. The gorilla could focus on one or two at a time. Could They Possibly Win? Technically, yes — in theory — if they:
Coordinated as a team with some willing to sacrifice themselves (i.e., get mauled or killed to restrain the gorilla). Dog-piled it, using sheer weight and numbers to pin it down. Targeted eyes, throat, joints in a sustained assault. Even then, it would result in dozens of human deaths or severe maimings. A rampaging gorilla could instantly incapacitate multiple men with swipes and throws before they even got close.
Verdict: 99.9% of the time, the gorilla wins, unless the 100 men are highly trained, brave, and coordinated. Even then, the casualty rate would be catastrophic. So, unless this is a highly tactical team of Spartans or martial artists, the gorilla reigns supreme.
I ask Todd at the rhe bus stop what he thought and he said he could easily defeat a gorilla single handedly.
Well of course, but the scenario is a 100 unarmed men, not one Todd. That scenario would just be ridiculous.
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Humans literally evolved to use tools, it’s like asking a tiger to hunt without using their claws. Taking tools away from humans is not making them equal to the animal they are hunting, it’s handicapping them.
If you want to make them equal then the fight is 1 v 1 and the human has tools.
Me explaining why I brought a gun to the MMA fight
Gorillas are apes, just like us. They didn’t evolve to use claws or fangs…or tools. Just sheer, brute strength. We cannot compete with that, any more than we can against a tiger.
Which is why I said what I said…weapons? Yes. Unarmed? No.
100 men can’t take on one Gorilla? It’d only take a few to strategize and chase it to exhaustion.
And then what? Slap it to death? Tell it unbearable jokes until it kills itself? Even exhausted, a gorilla could kill you with a casual backhand. What could you do, in return?
Don’t let it rest or sleep until it collapses from exhaustion. Humans have been persistence hunters for a long time. With 100 men that becomes a job of taking shifts shouting and running around. Early on the gorilla may catch some of the men, as it tires it becomes less effective. If the humans are allowed to pick up sticks, stones or even mud, the job becomes easier and safer. Once the gorilla passes out you can either declare the fight won, or move onto the grizzly business of killing it either by strangulation or wounding.
Once a couple of humans die the others can fashion their bones into weaponry
Brutal, but quite possibly effective.
How would you even do that? What possible action could you take against a gorilla, that would lead to its exhaustion? Even if it fell asleep, and ten people jumped on it all at once (because there wouldn’t be enough room for all 100 to approach)…it would wake up just long enough to kill them all, before rolling over again, and going back to sleep.
Or it could just sit and wait patiently, for the humans to do nothing. Stalemate.
There’s one gorilla and 100 men. With 30 men per shift you have enough people to harrass the gorilla with loud noises, feints and just being a potential threat. Don’t let it eat, drink or sleep for a few days and it’ll likely drop from dehydration if nothing else. Even if it gets water, the average western lowland gorilla needs to eat around 20kg of vegetation per day. I suppose it would depend on where this confrontation took place, but it should be possible to distract it and prevent it eating for some time.
If the contestants, gorilla and human alike, are allowed to pick up and use things in the environment, then it really is game over for the gorilla as it runs from a hail of sticks, stones, mud and anything else the humans can lay their hands on.
A gorilla has a fearsome turn of speed over short distances, but, from what I can find out, even if they slow down close to human walking speed it can only go a few miles before needing to rest. If the humans are allowed use their environment to harrass the gorilla they can kerp it moving long past the point it would choose to stop, and they’ll eventually wear it down to the point it can’t defend itself.
I can see how making noise might keep it awake, but how will you stop it from eating and drinking? It can basically ignore you, no matter how many people are with you, and just go about its business as if you weren’t even there. If you try to physically prevent it from doing anything, you are automatically going to be within striking distance…which means instant death to anyone who tries.
Stopping it eating or drinking would involve being a constant low grade threat that it has to spend time and energy monitoring. Gorillas normally live in groups which means that while one is on lookout duty the others can feed in peace. A single gorilla being constantly harassed by what is comparatively huge group of humans would find itself in a constant state of fight-or-flight.
If the humans were ineffective at stopping it drinking in particular, or finding hydrating food, the contest could end up going on for a very long time.
Obviously, a lot depends on the exact rules and location of the encounter. If it’s in the gorilla’s prefered forests and the humans can’t use the environment, it’ll be a stalemate. If it’s somewhere enclosed, so the humans can’t escape, the gorilla wins. If it’s somewhere reasonably open, with less food, the humans could wear the gorilla down. If both sides can use the environment it swings it further towards the humans by overwhealming numbers throwing things.
If it can kill you backhanded it’s not exhausted enough. I don’t think you’re thinking savagely enough.
What would you even do, to make it exhausted? In the wild, gorillas are not afraid of people. They just sit there looking at you, until you get on their nerves. There’s nothing you or a hundred people could do to tire it out, if it simply chooses not to move.
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I’m a father, with plenty of experience around small children. What’s exhausting, is the effort you put into not losing your patience when they’re being annoying. If I didn’t give a shit what happened to them, I wouldn’t have lost a minute’s worth of sleep.
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You make it kill people until it is exhausted
I doubt a hundred swings of its arms is going to do the trick.
Some people seem to forget that humans can cause literal stampedes with each other in large crowds and will suffocate anything underneath.
I don’t think a mammoth, or even a bull, would be very impressed by some humans stampedeing.
I bet any mommoth would be impressed by this.
POV: The pilot beating the crap out of holy rollers in Airplane!.
With a little creativity, and total dedication despite the high chance of being ripped apart, 100 men could take down a silverback without weapons or tools. Some go for the legs, some go for the arms, some go for the eyes, and then there’s the really buff guy that locks arms around the head, while the others turn him by the feet, like a wrench, until it’s neck breaks. Or someone jams their arm down it’s throat until it suffocates. May take a few attempts and arms. Or there’s the butthole, someone mentioned entrails, I dunno. Imagination.
~25 are more than enough, if they are willing to die. Once a single person gets on the gorillas back while it is distracted and does a proper rear-naked-choke its gg.
Edit: Even if you think this is bs, there is no fucking way a gorilla could take 100. People are vastly overestimating how strong the average gorilla is and underestimating how strong a human pumped full of adrenaline is.
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100%. A good comparison is 100 rats vs 1 human. And a human is much closer in strength to a gorilla than to a rat.
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In this case I was talking about an actual fight. I should have explained that better. You are right though.
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Ever tries stomping a rat?
I did, as a kid, in the horse stables I rode at. The owner had a standing offer of 10 marks per a dead rat. Never managed any.
Ofc they weren’t attacking me, different scenario. I’m just saying the aiming would be a little harder than in Skyrim.
Rats have a mean bite and jump quite a bit.
I’m honestly not sure about a hundred rats. Depends on what sort of armor you had I guess. If you get a leather jacket, thick denim pants, and good boots, you’re fine. If you’re naked though?
Eh… have you heard of lingchi?
Even if you catch one in your hands, which might be harder than it sounds, wringing their neck while they scramble and bite might be a tad challenging. Even stomping on them or kicking them with a bare foot hard enough to kill might prove hard. Sterdy slippery bastards.
But yeah I still imagine a 100 naked men would win over a gorilla though.
Yo that’s from the movie Ice Age
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It would probably take 5 -10 unarmed (and not allowed to use any tools) fit adult men to take down a gorilla, depending on a variety of factors. Most gorillas would rather run than confront humans, though.
What are they gunna do, punch it to death? Good fucking luck. They’re not going to be able to pin it down, the gorilla will probably gut at least one of them and beat the shit out of a couple before anything even gets going and it may even use as a flail against the others if it’s feeling particularly spicy and tool-usey that day.
That big forehead is also because it’s all muscle that pulls a giant, fanged mouth shut with incredible force. Grown adults can be killed, and definitely at least subdued, by dogs and you think a handful of “fit” men could take a gorilla?
Laughable, honestly. They couldn’t even do enough damage if they came upon while sleeping and didn’t have a huge rock to crash on its head.
They don’t have to kill the gorilla, just disable it. Fingers, meet eyeballs. It’s hard to stop five pairs of arms at once. It would be at great cost to the men, of course, but it’s not as impossible as you make it seem.
How easy do you think it is to get in a gorilla’s eyes? Their arms are incredibly long and built like tree trunks, they could toss anyone aside with embarrassing ease. And that’s not to mention the teeth you’ll have to stick your hand in the general direction of, though I did already mention them.
The eye thing works for alligators that have already bitten you and it’s largely because at that point they have nothing to keep your arms away from their face.
You’re not disabling a gorilla with only five to ten “fit adult men”. You might get ten incredibly strong and heavy weightlifters in there if you’re lucky but I’m sorry, the Gorilla will fucking kill you.
Have you seen a gorilla? Even 10 men, it grabs one and starts flailing him around like a sack of potatoes, knocking everyone down potentially. Go ahead and charge a gorilla flailing an adult to poke its eyes.
This thread is filled with people underestimating the neck strength gorillas have.
Good luck being able to choke out a fking gorilla, no matter what sort of Eddie Hall sized bastard you are.
I may be mistaken but I doubt that any remotely average or even slightly above average person could choke out a gorilla, even if the gorilla can’t remove the person with his arms and is just flexing his neck.
No need for that. They would just have to harass it until it died of heat stroke.
That seems much more rational, yeah.
And I’m not being sarcastic. It plays to our strengths. We can perspirate much better.
Don’t sweat it. No, actually, sweat it! Sweat it real hard!
Y’all are severely overestimating unarmed humans. It’s ridiculous, unless the gorilla is sleeping. 15-20 men could dogpile the gorilla and it would just stand up and swat ten other men down with one arm.
The gorilla could charge the group like silverbacks seem to always do, half the men would instantly be incapacitated.
The gorilla could take one guy, lift him by his head swinging him around to beat all the other men, or just rip the guys legs off and then use the legs as weapons.
The gorilla could climb a tree and then take a nap, and any of the guys who tried to climb the tree would fall to their deaths.
With spears or sticks or rocks the men would win, but without any weapons, it’s dumb to think the men even have a chance….
In real life… a hundred men could scare a gorilla away, as long as the gorilla didn’t realize they were unarmed.
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This.
People massively underestimate numbers. 100 people is a lot.
For comparison, a human would have no trouble against a single terrier. But an unarmed human against 100 terriers is a different story.
In movies it’s quite easy for a skilled fighter to take on 100 enemies. In reality, 1 vs 3 is already a very unbalanced fight.
There are some healthy humans that weigh about that much.
What? Even if you were 2.5 metres tall, you’d still be very obese.
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Biologist Dirk Draulans commented on this topic and his conclusion was that the first 10 to 20 people would be cannon fodder who’d get their limbs ripped off, but after two minutes the gorilla would tire and be overpowered. Similar to running it’s humans their endurance that wins over explosiveness.
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The best of our fighters all 20-30 of them immediately die ok I’ll agree
handful seriously injured equals 20-30 killed to you? Let me guess, maths isn’t your biggest strength?
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That one guy comes back walking funny “I thought you said beat OFF!”
