• Telodzrum@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Diseased humans and their corpses. I can’t believe this meme still gets posted regularly.

    • ArbitraryValue
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      3 months ago

      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.

    • PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      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.

      • snooggums@midwest.social
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        3 months ago

        …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.

    • TeamAssimilation@infosec.pub
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      3 months ago

      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.

      • accideath@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        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.

    • sartalon@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I just saw this meme, though it was funny. Showed it to my friend and he said almost exactly this.

      It makes perfect sense now that I hear it.

    • FrostyTheDoo@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      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.

    • curiousaur@reddthat.com
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      3 months ago

      And mentally ill / under the influence. You could say sick includes those. The danger was real.

      • IzzyScissor@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Around 2% of your DNA comes from Neanderthals. If we were scared off by them, it wouldn’t have been for too long before we decided the sex was worth it.

        • SapphironZA
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          3 months ago

          Only if you are of European or middle eastern descent. If you are from South east Asian descent, you are more likely to have Denisovan DNA.

          If you are from more recent African descent, you likely are straight homo sapien.

  • NateNate60@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    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

  • Nora@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    There were tons of humanoid species around before we killed them all. Neanderthals, etc. Wonder why they’re dead? Could be this.

  • masquenox@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    …or it’s just that requiring co-operative society for our survival wired us to pick up on very subtle facial and figurative signals and signs when it comes to human behavior and anything “off” about it sticks out like a sore and creepy thumb.

  • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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    3 months ago

    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.

  • Victor@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    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. 🤷‍♂️

    • Wanderer@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      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.

    • Enkrod@feddit.org
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      3 months ago

      No, but the aversion reaction to the uncanny valley is pretty strong. It’s more likely an adapted trait than not and can be easily explained by dead or sick humans and animals.

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
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    3 months ago

    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.