Why do we have an instinctive fear of humanoid creatures with similar altered features like pic related...

Zombies come from Haiti, the slaves feared that after they died, they'd be brought back and made slaves again.

Orginally zombies weren't monsters, they were a fate you were supposed to fear.

We coexisted with other humanoids for tens of thousands of years. Probably not very peacefully.

desu, this what I was going to say.
The uncanny valley effect may have existed as a mechanism for removing empathy from co-existing humanoid species.

We naturally develop empathy for beings with human-like characteristics, which would have benefit through altruism. However, when placed in contact with someone with a certain divergence of facial characteristics, a sort of irrational hatred begins to form, likely because acknowledging, or sharing empathy would have negative effects, perhaps due to oversharing resources.

Would that mean racist tendencies are genetic?

Looks like a decaying corpse. Re,inns us of death and possibly sickness.

Quadruped vicious creatures are more pants shitting than humanoid ones, you would be petrified if a lion was near you compared to say a nigger. Interestingly insects freak us the fuck out despite being harmless meaning they general alieness of the insect is frightening.

Morality over the centuries has caused us to view ourselves as separate from the animal kingdom. When we see something that is human yet slightly off, we see the animality of ourselves once again, and we don't want to embrace that.

How did these humans find their way back after 9 hours of wandering in the wilderness? And isnt it hard for them to walk 9 hours in the sun, kill the animal and carry the corpse for 9 hours and more back to the camp?

this.

its because of romero and the information age dumbass.

I mean, probably, it's not so much racism then it is "species-ism". But the empathetic gap between, let's say, Homo Neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens is much, much wider then the gap between a negroid and a caucasian.

Nah europeans would probably see Neanderthals closer to them because of their skin color but see blacks as wild animals due to their skin color.

Actually, I kinda doubt that.
Neanderthals had an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex. While they had the same skin color (and skin color obviously does contribute to an empathetic gap, we seem to have a natural ability to determine intelligence from abnormalities around the head (just look at the social ostracization downies recieve). At first, maybe europeans would see them as fellow men, but it would quickly become obvious that neanderthals were mentally "odd", and uncanny valley/social ostracism would set in.

So what, blacks were literally always seen as nonhumans because of their skin color alone. Neanderthals would be seen the same as slavs just big dumb oafs(who in reality were actually smarter than humans).

Zombies come originally from West Africa, not Haiti. It's part of vaudoun (rings a bell maybe ?), still practiced heavily in Benin/Nigeria, among other countries. Pic related.

Zombies (called Eguns in Benin/Nigeria) there are believed to come back from the dead to give advice to the living and eventually punish those who do bad deeds. There, they are feared because of their great power, being revengeful and the suffering they can inflict.

Haiti version of vodoun is a bit bastardized by their slave experience, it's not the original stuff.

> mfw once of the most popular movie genra from the 2010's is based off African religion.
Take that, SJW wankers complaining about the eurocentrism of Hollywood.

Sorry for going full autist on your post, I had to correct.

The "zombies" in western media is more similar to ghouls from Arabic mythology.

Neanderthals had larger cranial capacity though?
In some respects they were much more intelligent than homo sapiens.

Damn, that seems like more work spent getting food than you would get back from eating it.

They wouldn't be fleeing 9 hours straight into one direction. The animal would try to charge through them, turn 180 degrees and stuff like that, and the hunters would be forcing it as close to their homes as they could

>who in reality were actually much smarter than humans
Do you have any evidence to prove this?
I am aware that they had a system of cermonial burial, and created one of the first synthetic materials, but this is likely a factor of the same cultural evolution that humanity was subject to.
I imagine you would use the argument that neanderthals has a much larger cranial capacity, but large brain size does not necessarily equate to to intelligence. In fact, people in cold climates seem to have a much larger brain due to metabolic efficiency (inuits share this trait with scandinavians). In fact, they had a much less developed pre-frontal cortex, which governs executive functions, meaning they probably didn't have the same cognitive abilites as homo sapiens.

Ok, dumbass. Want to explain to me why Romero's zombies are so prolific in all forms of media in this information age? Why millions of people are afraid of cannibalistic rotting people?

Like OP pointed out, people are afraid of humanoid creatures with strange faces and proportions. So why are the dead rising up to eat us so particularly frightening to people?

sci-news.com/othersciences/anthropology/science-neanderthals-smart-early-humans-01896.html

Their foreheads may have been small but their frontal lobes were working just fine meaning their neuro format is different from ours.

The name zombie comes from that, but the concept itself is present all around the world (Arabian ghoul, European revenant, NA wendigo, Philippine aswang)

>Persistence hunting meme
That would be because it's bullshit. The only time it's been recorded, the crew was giving the native bottles of water and egging him on. There are, apparently, a few tribes that do it as a right of passage (with a lone hunter), but that's about it.

Wherever there are primitive humans, there is water, and wherever there is water, there are cliffs, and humans were never so retarded as to run after a single animal for hours for one meal, when they could simply drive a whole herd of a cliff, and both feed and clothe the whole tribe for months.

And the sad truth is that all archeological evidence points towards the first meat-eating hominids as scavengers. The first tool use being to break open the bones left behind by real meat eaters, in order to eat the leftover marrow. That's always been the primate's greatest strength - incredibly innovative scavenging.

Zombies are a metaphor for the dehumanization caused by over concentrated population. Basically, you see hundreds, if not thousands, of strangers every day, who you know nothing of, will know nothing of, and thus are effectively empty shells of human beings - or zombies - to you, and then the fear of what would happen if they all these mysterious soulless individuals suddenly rose up and attacked.

San are the most retarded humans on earth user.

>Basically, you see hundreds, if not thousands, of strangers every day, who you know nothing of, will know nothing of, and thus are effectively empty shells of human beings - or zombies - to you, and then the fear of what would happen if they all these mysterious soulless individuals suddenly rose up and attacked.

This seems to answer my question best. Fear of zombies (living or rotting corpses) is very much akin to our natural skeptical view of strangers. Being in a crowded area and suddenly seeing everyone running and screaming or being devoured in a cannibalistic frenzy is very much like a person's natural fear of mob mentality and the sudden violence and chaos it can create

Probably an aversion to breeding with disease and deformity. Most mammals have similar initial reactions to sufficient deformity. Even some insects will consider a sufficiently deformed member of their own species a meal rather than a mate (then again, that's already a fuzzy line for a lot of bugs.)

I suppose there's also the possibility that we were competing with a lot of other hominids in the early days - but there's more evidence to suggest that we went ahead and bred with them rather than simply killed them all off (though I'm sure there was a lot of the latter going on as well).

I'm completely talking out of my ass right now, and I'm not documenting shit.

But I suppose this is something similar to why we find cute anything with a big eye to face ratio (kittens, puppies, small mammals...), because our babies are like that, and it is instinctive to protect them.

Someone slightly deformed is either because of a disease, or because he was hurt, maybe by other creatures. Any way it goes, it's a good sign to gtfo.

Internet myth. Beckford was wrong about the Arabic folklore he thought he was describing in Vathek.

The Arabic goul didn't feast on corpses. They just hung out in cemeteries. Probably invented as a way to explain why people are naturally creeped out by death, graves, graveyards, and cemeteries.

because it is a easy thing to be afraid of retard.
The dead coming back to eat you. Dead people don't come back. It is not natural. Later zombie movies added to it with paranoia about science gone wrong or unethical corporations fucking shit up.

In many ways zombies were the new vampires of the early 20th century.

The apex predators of early humanity.

They would also move differently and have very different mannerism from us, which we would probably find creepy.

Zombies aren't inherently scary. American style zombies aren't popular in Japan because the idea of corpses rising out of the ground isn't scary to them. Why? Probably because they cremate corpses as the primary way they deal with the dead.

Only they didn't look like that.

I mean, would our ancestors have fucked them if they did?

>Basically, you see hundreds, if not thousands, of strangers every day, who you know nothing of, will know nothing of, and thus are effectively empty shells of human beings

Except this is wrong.

I know where these people live and work. I know what books they are likely to read and I know what TV show they are likely to watch tonight, after they get home from shopping in the same store as me. I know what they saw on the news yesterday. I know the stories they tell their children before putting them to bed. I know how they will likely decorate their home come Christmas time, and they'll sing the same songs I will.

The world isn't that strange and people aren't that scary if you leave your bedroom every once in a while.

It was the other way around. The Neanderthals bred with human females so much that over thousands of years of rape and sexual enslavement, they slowly became more human; Our Europeans.

> this

Anons, I think we found the way to change Muslims into actual human beings. It was under our nose all along.

This is a great day.

The Ottoman elite in Konstantiyye had fairer hair and features then their servants, due to interbreeding with balkan harem girls.

Incorrect.

There is no Neanderthal Y chromosomal DNA present

consider this

Really makes me think...

That's from Danny Vendramini's predation theory, but most of it is bullshit, especially the part about how neanderthals looked like.
outwardbounder.wordpress.com/2012/12/05/why-bug-eyed-furry-neanderthals-are-stupid/

Although a long conflict with other hominids could explain the op question.

outwardbounder.wordpress.com/2012/12/05/why-bug-eyed-furry-neanderthals-are-stupid/

yeah. we actually want to fuck near human species

There were other human species on Earth once. It's a racial memory.

>blacks were literally always seen as nonhumans because of their skin color alone.

Back then, the definiton of subhuman was anyone that wasn't your ethnic group. Greeks viewed Germanics the same way they viewed Nubians: disgusting barbarians.

Made sense because the idea that just because yo look exactly alike doesnt mean you are the same species made sense, since different species look similar yet are different.

And yet thanks to them, Homo sapiens didn't go extinct. I guess we owe those flatfaced big headed tribes.

But they're Caucasian. Are you calling Caucasians non-human?

I guess that's why some groups in some places still don't see the other as human. For example, some Bantu people still enslave their Pygmy neighbors and sometimes eat them, specifically because they view them as non-human.

I wonder how isolated tribes off the coast of India and Southeast Asia view other humans, especially the ones that look nothing like them superficially.

>Why do we have an instinctive fear of humanoid creatures with similar altered features like pic related?

Memes. That looks like a guy in makeup. Most horror effects age terribly, this is not good evidence for there being some universal scariness behind it all. The simplest, best explanation is that rubber suit effects are cheap, film got invented a few decades after the gothic horror fad, and if you really need the evolutionary angle, film out-competed the traditional memes.

That was almost certainly the case for Orlock in particular.
>tall, stiff limbs, pale, had claw-like fingers and a rat-like face
>contextualized in-canon as a plague-carrying omnivore (like a flytrap, like a spider, etc.), as well as a ghostly apparition from some old world country

Because of the great vampire war in 300 B.C

You know we used to live along a bunch of diffrent homonids in prehistory, most of them probably hade some messed up facial features, compared to humans and for some reason violence insued and then we killed them off cause fuck yeah humans

would explain why we respond with fear towards things that look like humans but not quite, cause you know we used to fucking figth those kinds of things

First humans were niggers.

No, the first human was a chimp-like species named Homo habilis. If you're referring to modern humans, they were about as racially black as a Khoisan is.

Sure thing stormfag lmao.

Not necessarily that simple; there were different tiers among barbarians (for example, Juvenal in one of his satires singles out the Nubians among the barbarians)

i just looked up the homo habilis

it literally looks like a nigger

>outwardbounder.wordpress.com/2012/12/05/why-bug-eyed-furry-neanderthals-are-stupid/

I really enjoyed that article, thanks!

Get your facts straight m8. Anyone with a decent grasp of history knows it comes from the actions of the vampire partisans that the Hwan Empire seeded throughout Finnic territory. Much like Al-Qaeda, the vampires spread and continued to be a threat far out of the hands of their original masters long after the conflict they were created for ended.

To be fair the average Anglo-Germanic has a disgusting and unhealthy skin color in a Mediterranean's eyes.

They look exactly like Slavs lmao

Explain how I'm a stormfag.

They really don't.

No they don't, those are pure anglo, right down to their beady eyes. slavs are like picrelated

This. Fear of "the other" is incredibly strong among mankind, because it has it's roots in living around other humanoids who were potential rivals and enemies. It's probably why whenever you get an ethnic minority, they get genocided after a while. The people just don't like them for being different, "the other" people.

>baldness and other "off" features are associated with diseases
>baldness

>ceremonial burial
Debatable. Pollen has been found associated with a couple of Neanderthal skeletal deposits, but whether they got there because there were flowers placed at the burial or because of taphonomic processes after the fact is not clear. I personally lean more towards the latter.

Jesus, imagine living like that.

Working day in and day out, never getting a single break, worked to the point of exhaustion, and then believing that even the sweet release of death won't be permanent, and you'll still be a slave after.

Are

are you George Bailey?

Probably has something to do with face-perception. Face discrimination is an important evolutionary trait and even newborn babies have some inherent facial recognition. Probably also has somethinng to do with aesthetic preferences for symmetry and, with something like clowns, make-up and color juxtapositions. White, pale skin also carries similarities to dead corpses.
Same goes for puppets, mannequins, androids, dolls, Olivier de Sagazan, and so on. Zombies are slightly different, in that rot and decomposition usually elicits abjection and disgust, which is different from thhe uncanny valley.

Because what the fuck are they? They aren't human, they aren't beasts, we can't fit them into an easy, familiar category. That makes people uncomfortable.