Has any civilisation ever investigated this? Do you think they should?

Question

Science is an ancient pursuit and you know it occurred to me recently that since we are the only race we know of to study science there's a question that I think would have been one of the first to engage the human mind. Biology in some form or another has been around for pretty much as long as human beings could write but has any civilisation ever clinically tested how many of a certain species of fellow lifeforms an unarmed human being could take on in a fight and win. Given how frivelous and unethical it would be to test this now I don't imagine this will happen any time soon but it strikes me as a pretty Roman sounding thing to do. I for one think it would be pretty interesting to look in an encyclopaedia look up any given animal and find out its diet, its size, its habitat and then as a footnote something like "An average unarmed human being could fight 6 of them and expect to win". Anyone know of any such experiments?

Answer 1

I don't think it's been done, but I agree it sounds like a pretty 'Roman' thing to do because the closest thing I can think of is the gladiators and when they had to fight things like lions and tigers...