Fuck you, kowalski
@memes@lemmy.world
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
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.
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.
Diseased humans and their corpses. I can’t believe this meme still gets posted regularly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
As the distance between two species widens, viable (ie, not sterile) offspring become rarer and rarer (although not impossible), so there would be a biological incentive not to “waste time” banging something that looks too different from yourself