Diseased humans and their corpses. I can’t believe this meme still gets posted regularly.
IIRC Sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans coexisted for some time, so it could be not about things that aren’t human, but humans that are different. To this day, xenophobia and ethnocentrism are common attitudes.
Yea but homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis definitely interbred. A lot. A measurable chunk of modern human DNA is neanderthal in origin. The uncanny valley being there to spot sick and dead people is more likely.
Not just humans - I think it’s not unusual to see a sick animal, notice that it’s “moving wrong”, and feel a revulsion that motivates staying away from it. It’s a very handy instinct if, for example, that animal might have rabies…
Edit: I agree with you, I’m just expanding on what you said.
Could also have been cannibals, a lot of folklores talk about people who aren’t really people that kill and eat people. Some versions of the tale of the wendigo feature whoever encounters them in their human forms noting that they knew they must be wendigo because they looked like normal people but something just felt wrong about how they behaved.
Uncanny valley could be at play in the ick you feel when you can tell for no apparent reason that someone’s a psychopath or dangerous in some other way, the unconscious response to the things your brain noticed that you didn’t.
…they knew they must be wendigo because they looked like normal people but something just felt wrong about how they behaved.
Humans have a pretty good knack of recognizing things without understanding the cause. Wendigo sounds kind of like a cannibal who got a prion disease, with the unusual physical behaviors.
Sir/ma’am, this is a meme subreddit, most people are here to just be silly. And there’s also the fact that not everyone has seen every meme and done the work to debunk it, as apparently you have.
subreddit
Did you take a wrong turn somewhere? This isn’t Reddit.
Oh, I thought this was Reddit!
I thought this was America!
Subcommunity*
*Community
Dead/sick people
And mentally ill / under the influence. You could say sick includes those. The danger was real.
Mentally ill people are far, far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it.
Just a fact worth pointing out.
/thread
Rabies
Everyone thinks it was humans. Why not a remnant from that time Nature started doing deepfakes to kill
https://www.livescience.com/41604-animals-that-mimic-plants-photos.html
Not necessarily, it could just be a fear of humans or hominids that weren’t the same as your own tribe. In that sense, ingrained racism and uncanny valley would be the same psychological effect.
I would say there’s an evolutionary need to be afraid of things we don’t understand. Lots more examples of that as well.
When it looks like something we think we recognize but it looks unfamiliar at the same time, we don’t understand it, and we want to stay away from it.
Simple as that, in my mind. 🤷♂️
Literally rabies
I dont think that’s smart, I think it’s just wrong.
This gets posted a lot, but nobody ever seems to post what the thing was.
The answer is probably “other hominids”. Humans (Homo sapiens specifically) co-existed with them for a long time and competed with them over resources.
Edit: and the genetically deformed (with whom it would be beneficial to not breed, at least from an evolutionary standpoint) and corpses or people with disease
Also corpses, I see it debunked pretty much every time it’s posted
So you’re saying zombies used to be real? 😱
And the only reason they’re gone is because we stopped fucking them
Maybe you stopped
Tina no
Yeah. “Used to be”. Let’s go with that. Less paperwork.
To elaborate more, I think that it’s because if humans have an aversion to other hominids and corpses, we wouldn’t try to waste resources attempting to breed with them.
We very much did bread with other hominids
What kind? Rye? 😆
That’s on a knead to know basis
See e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans
Corpses, illness, “bad genes” (asymmetry etc) seems like a more reasonable explaination in my ears, with interacting/breeding in mind.
Humans and neanderthals coexisted for awhile, also sociopathy has likely been present in our entire history, and rabies for at least 4000 years but likely much longer.
I mean, at some point humans and neanderthals coexisted and even interbred. I don’t think it’s a stretch that there could have been other similar species that we didn’t get along with even earlier than that.
Not every trait has an adaptive significance, FFS
Being lactose intolerance implies that at some point there was some deadly form of milk and squirting shit out of your arse at 400mph is an appropriate way of dealing with it.
There were tons of humanoid species around before we killed them all. Neanderthals, etc. Wonder why they’re dead? Could be this.
We did fuck with Neanderthals too, though. There’s still traces of their DNA in modern humans, I think
Homo Sapiens be like “interbreed/marry/kill”
It’s why aliens avoid us. They know how horny we are.
