I've found that starting with skilled armor user/skilled shield user/wrestler/competent hammerman/novice thrower works extremely well. You'll usually start with a mix of iron and bronze gear, sometimes with a maul. I use hammers with humans because: 1) the most damaging weapon type in the game (maul) uses the skill; 2) you can train the skill up by bashing things around with an easily found copper or bronze crossbow (which will significantly speed up the weapon skill leveling by not ULTIMATE CRUSHING everything weaker than an elephant on the first blow); 3) hammers and mauls never get "stuck," so you don't have to worry about it; and 4) the knockback effect is -very- useful if you have a couple of good throwing weapons to chuck when it happens.
First thing I do is find a calm desert to sneak around in to bump ambushing. (Moving is significantly slower in real-time inside cities, and the calm desert means you won't accidently bump into a hippo while you're sneak-spamming.)
After that, I find a cave with iron men and kill a few for their 3,000 coin corpse statues, which is usually enough to completely outfit my character in iron gear. Humans can use a maul and a shield, and you can stack iron platemail on top of iron chainmail. I never waste money on less than exceptional quality gear, either...you just have to walk around a bit to find a town that sells the exceptional or masterwork quality iron stuff. Also, don't forget masterwork/exceptional quality clothing on all your wear locations. Every little bit helps. Next, I'll buy a pair of good quality iron spears for chucking at things to soften them up.
Once you have a masterwork iron shield and an exceptional/masterwork iron maul, a newbie human can tear just about anything down in melee, with the above starting skills.
After you have all this stuff, there's no point in risking wrestling zombies. If you're not hidden while choking something (which you won't be, because zombies won't ever go unconscious on you), every monster on the map can "see" you and gravitates toward you. It doesn't take long for you to get surrounded by skeletons that way. I've found that bears are really good, because you can choke them for a very long time before they die, and they spawn singly, so you don't have to worry about something else coming up while you're spamming choke. Also, since I train ambushing to legendary first thing, deer and warthogs are great wrestling buddies, because generally there aren't any other aggressive creatures on the map that will run up and attack you.
Once you've got your attributes up from all the sneaking, throwing, and wrestling, a human is virtually unstoppable. In about 5 hours, you'll be good enough to kill hydras solo. A few more hours of shield work and dragons aren't really a problem.
The only real threat at that point is from archers and fire imps, because even a shitty one can nail you, especially if you're in a goblin fort and one shoots you from behind. The spears are great for this, because you can sneak up on them and incapacitate/kill them with thrown weapons before they see you, or if they walk up on you in the middle of a fight, you can chuck a spear at them before they get a chance to shoot you. You're virtually guaranteed to break or seriously injure internal organs with legendary throwing and a masterwork iron spear (possible exception vs. human elite marksmen).