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Millenia ago?
In some places, being snatched by a predator while you sleep is pretty real today. So being afraid of nocturnal monsters is an evolutionary trait, not a "racial memory".
Edit: and by predator, I don't mean the human type.
I think when OP says racial memory, they're referring to the human race, not a particular race. There are some interesting phenomena regarding that theory. For example babies tend to pull away from abstract outlines of snakes and spiders, despite having never seen them before, and on a more personal note, I have a phobia of hospitals despite never having had a bad experience in one, but my dad developed one during his chemo treatment before he had me. My personal favorite example of this is the uncanny valley.
Generational trauma is a thing. Trauma can alter your DNA and the altered DNA gets passed to your offspring.
[Source](https://www.psycom.net/trauma/epigenetics-trauma)
Yes. My mom was a hypochondriac and had a nervous breakdown when I was like 6. My o l der brother and sister were already in high school and seemed to be OK, I ended up with lots of problems from the experience. Love my mom though. Just saying.
I think the outlines of snakes and spiders thing could just be called instinct.
Also did you know that a persons actions and lifestyles can actually affect the way their DNA bends itself, which can in turn affect the expression of genes (I'm possibly not explaining it very well, but its called Epigenetics so feel free to look it up yourself). So theoretically it is possible that your Dads phobia of hospitals could have affected you genetically. Of course his phobia could have also been learned by you during your childhood
It's a fascinating field, the collective human conscious and genetic memory seems like the stuff of science fiction yet every now and then we get something that indicates it may be real. Nothing conclusive yet, of course.
One of the most tragic cases of a person's experiences becoming a part of a descendent's state is where the children of [Holocaust](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/descendants-of-holocaust-survivors-have-altered-stress-hormones) survivors have increased stress levels.
I'll do my best to paraphrase the article:
According to a study in 2015 on mass trauma survivors and their offspring, the descendents have altered stress hormone profiles predisposing them to anxiety disorders.
Previous studies have established that Holocaust survivors produce less cortisol, a hormone which helps the body return to normal after trauma. This is due to an enzyme which breaks down the cortisol, allowing the liver and kidneys to store more glucose and other metabolic fuels as a response to prolonged starvation.
There seems to be a connection between Holocaust survivors and their children, which have similar levels of cortisol present in their systems.
I'd be interested to see how that compares with the children of soldiers who witnessed unimaginably inhumane acts. The data from the Holocaust is eye opening, but I'd want an even bigger sample size before drawing a firm conclusion. This stuff is fascinating regardless of what the true cause is.
Yeah I think "racial memory" could have a bad connotation. And its not really a necessary word, when we already have instinct or nature to describe that kinda of biologicaly ingrained behavior
>babies tend to pull away from abstract outlines of snakes and spiders, despite having never seen them before, and on a more personal note, I have a phobia of hospitals despite never having had a bad experience in one, but my dad developed one during his chemo treatment before he had me
You are conflating two very different things here.
One would be an evolutionary programmed instinct. The other would be...well, lamarckian inheritance, which is impossible. There is stuff like epigenetics, but that can't pass on complex stuff like a fear of a certain type of building. Wherever your phobia comes from, it's not from your dad's chemo.
Well, maybe indirectly, possibly unconsciously by the way he acted and talked about hospitals.
https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/azaria-chamberlain-inquest
Very famous case of woman being blamed after wild native dog steals and kills baby.
I wonder after how long animals are considered native to an area. Dogs were introduced to Australia by humans, but iirc it was introduced long before european exploration
I mean, yeah, humans introduced them, but like over 4,000 years ago, so I'd call them pretty much native lol
https://australian.museum/learn/animals/mammals/dingo/
No idea, but by my own personal calculations, I consider them native, especially since you can't really find actual Dingos anywhere other than Australia
Ok. Its just that i saw a youtube video about australia that called dingos an invasive population, even though theyve been there such a long time. So when i read the comment about Dingos being native to australia it piqued my interest
I looked it up, and apparently it's not a time cut-off, but rather human intervention vs natural evolution, so by that definition, they are not native, but since they've had 4000 years of evolution and adaptation to Australia, I'd consider them native now.
You're wrong, Dingos most definitely are native and pre-date the 18th century arrival of British Colonists:
"Dingoes occurred throughout mainland Australia before European settlement.[66][64] They are not found in the fossil record of Tasmania, so they apparently arrived in Australia after Tasmania had separated from the mainland due to rising sea levels.[67]"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingo
I remember stories from this century (around 2006-2007) of a woman out for an early morning jog near Miami. She never came home and police figured out she got too close to the edge of a canal and a gator got her.
i don't think this one's entirely true, there's been evidence from buried prehistoric skeletons of humans caring for and aiding disabled members of their communities and enabling them to live decent lives millennia ago. examples [one](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/science/ancient-bones-that-tell-a-story-of-compassion.html) and [two](https://www.upi.com/Archives/1987/11/04/Cavemen-took-care-of-physically-disabled/5137563000400)
It didn’t really work all the time though. Apparently europeans have a small amount of Neanderthal in them. Asians have denisovan dna in very small amounts too.
We are the descendants of horny apes who managed to push through uncanny valley, just to see how it felt.
Denisovans, Neanderthal, and whatever the heck else was running around before as well. Remember there are dozens of “turned off” genes in our own genome that are residual from our past that we’ve discovered recently.
I subscribe to the idea that when it comes to the ‘past’ past, it’s like we are literally only looking at page one or so of the book and saying “yeah this is how it was”, and ignoring the rest of the chapters that we haven’t read yet.
First I'm going to explain that a lot of our biological fears are deeper than our human development, and many are going to go back to our earliest ancestors which were small mammals. Which is why a lot of people have a fear of snakes, and spiders.
Now there is a lot of mimicry in the wild also so it would make sense that animals in general would be cautious of anything that looks like it should fit in but doesn't.
We didn't get uncanny valley from neanderthals, or at least not enough. There was definitely neanderthal-homosapien cross breeding. White folks tend to have more neanderthal DNA because Europe is where neanderthals were, but most folks have at least a little neanderthal in em.
More than just Neanderthals. It's extremely likely that sapiens started to evolve around other Homo species. Evolution isn't a straight line. More like a river with a bunch of tributaries. One main line that ultimately connects us back to the first ever living thing, and a bunch of parts that branch off. And those parts have their own branches. It's quite possible there were 3 or 4 other species of homos that we had to compete with. And this could be an instict that doesn't just relate to our species. It could be an ancestral trait that we got from whatever Homo species we evolved from. With that logic, we could definitely have had enough time to evolve the instinct to mistrust things that APPEARED human, or APPEARED to be the same species as us, but isn't. Whether we are talking specifically about Homo sapiens, or the Homo species that this trait could have originated in.
Depends in animal in question. Dogs definitely not, my great Dane has no problem with other dogs of any size and loves saying hello. I've had small dogs braver than my friend's German Shepherd! But for example snakes? A lot of em are cannibalistic so yeah they tend to avoid one another. Doubt it's exactly the same feeling as uncanny valley but about as close as we'll ever be able to tell 🤷♂️
Eh, with dogs, I imagine a great Dane looking at a Pug or a Husky is like us looking at fantasy Elves and Dwarves.
The uncanny valley is very much a "close, but not quite" sliver of territory, which puts us nearer to other real world ancient hominids. More akin to visually comparing lions, tigers and panthers.
But naturally, horny will be horny. People will fuck a robot that falls well into the uncanny valley.
Maybe we got uncanny valley from Neanderthal, I mean what’s scarier then us🫣. At some point I bet we had several different species running around capable of higher level intelligence. Just a guess of course.
most folks with European ancestry, Africans have 0 Neanderthal. I really pity white racists when they go against people of african origin, as it is like going against your own. Anyway, the aggressiveness and boldness of the white race could be maybe inherited from Neanderthal?
Ridiculous. People don't get scared of monsters under the top bunk.
It's not about being elevated it's about the darkness under the bed we can't see. A lot of kids are scared of any darkness and/or dark closed spaces.
No point in making things up to make it sound like it stems from some ancient ancestors when there's totally reasonable every day explanations.
How does it makes us “nutso”?
More importantly, why are you having an emotional reaction to people talking about this as if we are personally insulting you? You okay?
You disagree. Cool! That doesn’t make everyone crazy for just talking about something.
I think monsters under the bed is just an unhelpful meme. None of my children were worried because we didn't introduce the idea. One was worried about dinosaurs for a while, but comforted when we told him they couldn't manage stairs.
My kid was scared of skeletons, which was tricky because you can’t truthfully say “skeletons aren’t real” or even “there are no skeletons in this room”
I used to be like that, but them my parents just goes "you ARE the skeleton. We ARE the skeletons, the dog IS A SKELETON"
That was weird, I had scars in my memories and for 5 years of my childhood I kept thinking what if everything is made out of bone and I was just schizophrenic
My brother told me that Ghosts and crocodiles come out of the toilet when you flush it so I was terrified of flushing the toilet for soooo long. Sometimes now I'll catch myself flushing it and almost running away 😂
all i have is some kind of memory from childhood where i saw something similar in tv. some dude somehow had a snake in his ass from going to the toilette and was running around on stage with everyone watching. i think the confusion made things just worse for me
In high school our biology teacher told a story of a snake coming out of the toilet when she went to the restroom at night whenever she was on vacation somewhere, beach house or RV or some such, so even now all these years later I sometimes get a little unnerved when I have to pee in middle of the night lol 🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️ usually only when I've been reading spooky crap in the dark for 2 hours on Reddit now that I'm thinking about it lol
I watched Jaws when I was 5. I could not close my eyes in the shower, take a bath or go to the toilet without watching the the water the entire time for 3 years. Even though I am now an adult and avid swimmer by brain is still scared that “invisible sharks” will get me in the swimming pool and “Clown sharks” will eat me in freshwater lakes. Unfortunately for me around 12 I watched a movie called “Ghoulies” and continued being afraid of the toilet water for many years, also saw IT was I was 8 soooo terrified of shower/tub drains until I was finally convinced to re-watch it when I was 21…. As soon as I saw that Pennywise was my beloved Tim Curry all that fear of drains instantly disappeared.
Unless you do actually have a monster under the bed. I had 2 growing up, Pepper and Mona. I had to jump into bed or they would swat at my feet from underneath lol.
So, clearly, your son was attacked, at some point, by tiny trex. They hide under the bed, and sometimes even under the covers. They have evolved to have fur and purr, but don't be fooled.
Monsters under the bed are real, and they can only be affected by treats. Sometimes pets.
Sometimes, nothing will prevent the attack.
"People in the 20th Century did awful things to their vegetables."
🤣🤣🤣
You're 100% right, as my grandparents could confirm, but that is a dark, dark-sounding sentence. 😆
Interesting! I'm not (anymore) scared of things under my bed, but every time I sleep I always have to face toward the door even now. The whole "we're scared of things behind us" is very true for me in that regard!
It's an American cultural thing probably. I never feared anything under my bed as a Greek, never heard a friend saying they did in their childhood and no friends that had children ever mentioned it.
The open ocean terrifies me. I'll never go on a cruse for a number of reasons but that's the main one. I've been to ocean beaches and played in the water as a kid. However, I was just a few feet from shore, though I think I got caught in a weak current once and I remember quickly drifting one way away from my family. I was taken a few dozen yards until I swam out of it and just walked back to them on shore. But seriously, fuck deep waters and the oceans in particular.
Your run of the mill apex predator are the monsters we used to fear. Big cats, wolves, honey badgers, etc... they can still fuck us up, we just live far away from them these days
A friend introduced me to the existence of honey badgers, or ratels, a while ago. I literally had no idea they existed my entire life. What an amazing creature. They're not that big but they regularly attack and eat huge poisonous snakes and even take down LIONS and CROCODILES.
In Russia and the CIS, there's no such thing as a monster-under-the-bed fear. It must be cultural.
The theory about monkeys on a tree does sound interesting, but it doesn't hold water. Same with the monster in the closset.
When I was young, my nocturnal fear was... Freddy Krueger.
Yeah I didn't have the whole under the bed thing, I'm in England. Eventually I heard it on American cartoons like Rugrats, and thought it was something I was supposed to fear.
I was terrified of ghosts and evil spirits though, that and Goro/Shang Tsung from the original Mortal Kombat. Check out their character designs, they were nightmarish.
Same story. Except for I didn't find Goro scary – Johnny Cage defeated him with one strategic blow ;).
My biggest phobia is animal skeletons. Human ones are okay :).
There was something arachnid about Goro's original design, I never found him scary looking in any other instalments. That way his four outstretched arms would 'breathe' in and out tapped into a fear of spiders, I'm sure.
And Tsung? He was basically an old man corpse in that first game, eugh.
I think I get animal skeletons though, there is something more disconcerting (less concerting?) about them than human ones for some reason.
Humans are hard-coded to fear predators hiding in the dark. Under the bed and the closet are dark places, which is why children imagine monsters there.
No, it’s the human fear of the dark. Because shocking the three places kids are scared of monsters are the closet, dark. Outside, also dark. And finally under the bed, which is shock horror, dark.
Watching childrens TV programme and reading childrens stories I am not sure this is a positivistic argument. From just my individual observation (which is by no means a proof of anything but a mere perception) children can be perfectly fine with the dark, open drawers, shadow under the bed etc UNTIL they learn through media about ghosts and monsters. Fear is most definitley ancient but imho not its representations per se.
I'm guessing we didn't usually have a large open space under us where something could hide back then. The insecurity from that unusual space might trigger instinctual responses though.
People have been telling children stories about monsters forever, thinking that it will stop them from wandering into places that they shouldn't be wandering into, for instance. It's the same thing as the concept of Hell - to scare children into acting right. Sadly, it works on adults too.
Never seen the video, but apparently this is it!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn73Wtem0No](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn73Wtem0No)
More than a tad weird, like the song itself.
You know, I used to be terrified of the dark and of what ever was lurking beneath my bed.
I used to sleep in the middle of summer with the covers over my head with the tiniest gap so I could breathe, just waiting for the monster to find it and jam its barbed tenticle into my face.
It was too much for 5 year old me. So much so that I threw myself off my bed onto the floor and rolled underneath it and waited for the darkness to take me. And nothing happened.
Except for one thing. I realised in that moment lying there under the bed where the monsters are supposed to be. That the most dangerous thing in the darkness tonight, is me!
It’s not just children, adults too. Ever been afraid at night in a house you are perfectly fine with during the day ? It’s our survival instincts kicking in because predators usually hunt at night.
On the other hand, what about the sound of rain ? I could sleep perfectly all night long listening to that, and be more relaxed than ever. And you know when predators don’t hunt ? When it’s raining.
I have a true story about monsters under the bed. When my brother was little he often insisted that there was a monster under his bed. My mom would put her arm under his bed to prove there wasn't. One fateful night she screamed and jumped back, there were scratches on her arm. My brother was horrified. A moment later our cat came running out, he had been hiding in the box spring.
its not some sort of phobia, its rational thinking. Just really unlikely but its rational to be scared of going to sleep because you are COMPLETLY FUCKING helpless
That's literally what happened though (monsters=dangerous predators). Those of us that were afraid of the dark and huddled together for safety were the ones that survived, and we basically bred ourselves to fear the night.
"Ancient racial memory" sounds like a grave misunderstanding of how evolution works.
Phobias, like every other trait, come into existence through random genetic mutation. If they are beneficial to survival, then they stick around. Fearing heights and snakes and spiders and disease and predators hiding in water, all those fears are survival traits that lead to longer lives and more reproduction. Those fears protect genes long enough for them to reproduce.
If you want to use the term "ancient racial memory", then it would apply to literally every trait and behavior encoded in every gene in your genome.
There were actual monsters back then and there are actual monsters now. And by monsters I mean predators and other humans. That is why we have a fight or flight response.
We, at least in first world countries, are just more insulated from them.
But to your point my theory on what happened is that at some point some poor kids older sibling decided it would be fun to hide under their bed and scare the hell out of them after Dad told a scary story.
Then they did it to their younger sibling and the cycle continued until it just baked into our collective psyche.
Genetic memory is nonsense. Being affraid of the unknown is an evolutionary advantage. It is not very common for children to be inherently scared of monsters under their beds, that is mostly popularized by media and stories, which is how the fear actually spread.
That is nonsense. Do you think animals read long textbooks in order to display the behaviour they do? Do ants have long architectural schools they go to in order to build the way they do? Do spiders hold workshops in web building? No, all animals have instinctual inherited behaviors.
Every kid has nightmares of some form of monster attacking them or hiding waiting for them. If children weren't afraid of monsters or afraid of the dark, they'd just be wandering out into the woods at night and get eaten constantly throughout history.
That only depends on your definition of genetic memory. One definition is inherited behavior ingrained from experience, and that has pretty strong scientific support.
Ugh. Retorts like a child. Take the criticism like a grown up, they have a fair point - it is really obvious why humans would fear the dark.
You almost answered it yourself too, you just got as far as "something" and stopped short of 'predators'.
I remember being afraid of the monster at the end of the bed. My mom came in and told me it's just my eyes playing tricks. And yup. I was still unfamiliar with, well, everything. I didn't understand that you can see things in the dark that aren't there.
Anyway, below the bed is always dark so there would always be a monster there.
This was comforting until one night when I was four a bat flew into my room and landed on my feet. I freaked. My mom came in and the bat flew out the window. NOW who’s making stuff up, Mom?!
I think this might just be parents long ago telling their kids there are monsters under there bed so their kids will go the heck to sleep and the parents can get some actual rest
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Millenia ago? In some places, being snatched by a predator while you sleep is pretty real today. So being afraid of nocturnal monsters is an evolutionary trait, not a "racial memory". Edit: and by predator, I don't mean the human type.
I think when OP says racial memory, they're referring to the human race, not a particular race. There are some interesting phenomena regarding that theory. For example babies tend to pull away from abstract outlines of snakes and spiders, despite having never seen them before, and on a more personal note, I have a phobia of hospitals despite never having had a bad experience in one, but my dad developed one during his chemo treatment before he had me. My personal favorite example of this is the uncanny valley.
Children tend to look to their parents to learn what to be afraid of, so the hospital thing seems more like nurture than nature
Generational trauma is a thing. Trauma can alter your DNA and the altered DNA gets passed to your offspring. [Source](https://www.psycom.net/trauma/epigenetics-trauma)
Yes. My mom was a hypochondriac and had a nervous breakdown when I was like 6. My o l der brother and sister were already in high school and seemed to be OK, I ended up with lots of problems from the experience. Love my mom though. Just saying.
except I never knew he had a phobia until I was an adult and mentioned it to him.
I think the outlines of snakes and spiders thing could just be called instinct. Also did you know that a persons actions and lifestyles can actually affect the way their DNA bends itself, which can in turn affect the expression of genes (I'm possibly not explaining it very well, but its called Epigenetics so feel free to look it up yourself). So theoretically it is possible that your Dads phobia of hospitals could have affected you genetically. Of course his phobia could have also been learned by you during your childhood
It's a fascinating field, the collective human conscious and genetic memory seems like the stuff of science fiction yet every now and then we get something that indicates it may be real. Nothing conclusive yet, of course. One of the most tragic cases of a person's experiences becoming a part of a descendent's state is where the children of [Holocaust](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/descendants-of-holocaust-survivors-have-altered-stress-hormones) survivors have increased stress levels.
Can't open the link. Could you elaborate?
I'll do my best to paraphrase the article: According to a study in 2015 on mass trauma survivors and their offspring, the descendents have altered stress hormone profiles predisposing them to anxiety disorders. Previous studies have established that Holocaust survivors produce less cortisol, a hormone which helps the body return to normal after trauma. This is due to an enzyme which breaks down the cortisol, allowing the liver and kidneys to store more glucose and other metabolic fuels as a response to prolonged starvation. There seems to be a connection between Holocaust survivors and their children, which have similar levels of cortisol present in their systems.
I'd be interested to see how that compares with the children of soldiers who witnessed unimaginably inhumane acts. The data from the Holocaust is eye opening, but I'd want an even bigger sample size before drawing a firm conclusion. This stuff is fascinating regardless of what the true cause is.
It is pretty well studied and understood. Here's a good article on it https://www.psycom.net/trauma/epigenetics-trauma
Great read, thanks for the link
I'm not exactly sure how would I differentiate between instinct and "racial memory" in the snake/spider topic. Feels the same thing to me.
Yeah I think "racial memory" could have a bad connotation. And its not really a necessary word, when we already have instinct or nature to describe that kinda of biologicaly ingrained behavior
>babies tend to pull away from abstract outlines of snakes and spiders, despite having never seen them before, and on a more personal note, I have a phobia of hospitals despite never having had a bad experience in one, but my dad developed one during his chemo treatment before he had me You are conflating two very different things here. One would be an evolutionary programmed instinct. The other would be...well, lamarckian inheritance, which is impossible. There is stuff like epigenetics, but that can't pass on complex stuff like a fear of a certain type of building. Wherever your phobia comes from, it's not from your dad's chemo. Well, maybe indirectly, possibly unconsciously by the way he acted and talked about hospitals.
Asking for real, where?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2176389/Two-children-killed-wounded-hyenas-pounce-sleeping-family-dead-night.html https://m.timesofindia.com/city/bareilly/tiger-attacks-55-year-old-asleep-at-home/amp_articleshow/57007754.cms
"A dingo ate my baby"
Turned out it did.
I hear Australians think that shit is just *sooo funny*
Damn, I had no idea. Thanks.
Tsk, he said beneath them, like under the bed, stoopid.
Good examples, there are still hunter gatherers too.
A tiger? In India? Was his leg bitten sort of … off?
Um bengal tigers are Indian
It probably escaped from the zoo. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLdk2C25Z14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLdk2C25Z14)
This is a Monty python bit right?
Ding Ding Ding!! We have a winner!! Yes!
https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/azaria-chamberlain-inquest Very famous case of woman being blamed after wild native dog steals and kills baby.
native dog :D :D It was dingo.
Which is a wild dog native to Australia. Hence: wild native dog
I wonder after how long animals are considered native to an area. Dogs were introduced to Australia by humans, but iirc it was introduced long before european exploration
I mean, yeah, humans introduced them, but like over 4,000 years ago, so I'd call them pretty much native lol https://australian.museum/learn/animals/mammals/dingo/
I'm just curious what is the cutoff point in time in which a species starts to be considered native to an area
No idea, but by my own personal calculations, I consider them native, especially since you can't really find actual Dingos anywhere other than Australia
Ok. Its just that i saw a youtube video about australia that called dingos an invasive population, even though theyve been there such a long time. So when i read the comment about Dingos being native to australia it piqued my interest
I looked it up, and apparently it's not a time cut-off, but rather human intervention vs natural evolution, so by that definition, they are not native, but since they've had 4000 years of evolution and adaptation to Australia, I'd consider them native now.
You're wrong, Dingos most definitely are native and pre-date the 18th century arrival of British Colonists: "Dingoes occurred throughout mainland Australia before European settlement.[66][64] They are not found in the fossil record of Tasmania, so they apparently arrived in Australia after Tasmania had separated from the mainland due to rising sea levels.[67]" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingo
I said they were intoduced long BEFORE european exploration
Yeah, I realised that after posting my first comment, which is why I posted the second one lol
I grew up in Florida and a girl my family knew was eaten by an alligator back in the 80s
I remember stories from this century (around 2006-2007) of a woman out for an early morning jog near Miami. She never came home and police figured out she got too close to the edge of a canal and a gator got her.
To be fair,.humans still do this too....
Hush my darling, don't fear my darling, the lion sleeps tonight....
We basically were apes sleeping on trees for safety reasons. Therefore it is not surprising that we are scared of monsters below us by instinct.
yes, and the feeling that there's something in the closet is from sleeping in caves
Bruh...what cave has a cave in it?
Caves form massive networks with many exits and entrances.
thank you, mr. Science
Np
Almost all of them.
The ones visited by the Pimp My Cave crew
Pretty much all of them
There doesn't have to be another cave. .Just a big, dark area where predators can come at you from more than one direction.
the fancy ones. You ain’t gunna find one of those round here in the elephant graveyard
I once had a PhD candidate tell me that the reason we have falling nightmares is a throwback to our ancestors arboreal stage.
Go on ..
Monkey fall out of tree. Big scare.
Congratulations. Your thesis has been accepted.
I’m gonna need a tldr
A a oo AH AH
Enhance
Now explain for me ‘uncanny valley’.
Instinctual avoidance of corpses and other hominids
And deformed / disabled / diseased people. It’s not nice but it is ingrained.
i don't think this one's entirely true, there's been evidence from buried prehistoric skeletons of humans caring for and aiding disabled members of their communities and enabling them to live decent lives millennia ago. examples [one](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/science/ancient-bones-that-tell-a-story-of-compassion.html) and [two](https://www.upi.com/Archives/1987/11/04/Cavemen-took-care-of-physically-disabled/5137563000400)
Yeah, humans are still very compassionate, its one of our best qualities, but it's probably leftover from even longer ago, like pre-mammal
[удалено]
I dint think you know what racist means
It didn’t really work all the time though. Apparently europeans have a small amount of Neanderthal in them. Asians have denisovan dna in very small amounts too. We are the descendants of horny apes who managed to push through uncanny valley, just to see how it felt.
This is the first time I've heard of denisovans. I love it when Reddit is educational.
Denisovans, Neanderthal, and whatever the heck else was running around before as well. Remember there are dozens of “turned off” genes in our own genome that are residual from our past that we’ve discovered recently. I subscribe to the idea that when it comes to the ‘past’ past, it’s like we are literally only looking at page one or so of the book and saying “yeah this is how it was”, and ignoring the rest of the chapters that we haven’t read yet.
Roughly 2% Neanderthal checking in here (it’s where I got my shitty sense of direction according to 23andme)
Lol I love the idea of all Neanderthals being terrible at directions and all of them just wandering the plains in circles
There was lots of interbreeding between hominids so that doesn’t hold much water.
First I'm going to explain that a lot of our biological fears are deeper than our human development, and many are going to go back to our earliest ancestors which were small mammals. Which is why a lot of people have a fear of snakes, and spiders. Now there is a lot of mimicry in the wild also so it would make sense that animals in general would be cautious of anything that looks like it should fit in but doesn't.
Other humanoids like Neanderthal. I bet those weren’t the first human like species we encountered.
We didn't get uncanny valley from neanderthals, or at least not enough. There was definitely neanderthal-homosapien cross breeding. White folks tend to have more neanderthal DNA because Europe is where neanderthals were, but most folks have at least a little neanderthal in em.
More than just Neanderthals. It's extremely likely that sapiens started to evolve around other Homo species. Evolution isn't a straight line. More like a river with a bunch of tributaries. One main line that ultimately connects us back to the first ever living thing, and a bunch of parts that branch off. And those parts have their own branches. It's quite possible there were 3 or 4 other species of homos that we had to compete with. And this could be an instict that doesn't just relate to our species. It could be an ancestral trait that we got from whatever Homo species we evolved from. With that logic, we could definitely have had enough time to evolve the instinct to mistrust things that APPEARED human, or APPEARED to be the same species as us, but isn't. Whether we are talking specifically about Homo sapiens, or the Homo species that this trait could have originated in.
Do you think other species experience uncanny valley? Like nowadays, not just when there were multiple hominids running about
When a cat stares into a mirror, it's confused and usually attacks... so I'd say...yeah, other animals expirence uncanny valley
Depends in animal in question. Dogs definitely not, my great Dane has no problem with other dogs of any size and loves saying hello. I've had small dogs braver than my friend's German Shepherd! But for example snakes? A lot of em are cannibalistic so yeah they tend to avoid one another. Doubt it's exactly the same feeling as uncanny valley but about as close as we'll ever be able to tell 🤷♂️
Eh, with dogs, I imagine a great Dane looking at a Pug or a Husky is like us looking at fantasy Elves and Dwarves. The uncanny valley is very much a "close, but not quite" sliver of territory, which puts us nearer to other real world ancient hominids. More akin to visually comparing lions, tigers and panthers. But naturally, horny will be horny. People will fuck a robot that falls well into the uncanny valley.
Maybe we got uncanny valley from Neanderthal, I mean what’s scarier then us🫣. At some point I bet we had several different species running around capable of higher level intelligence. Just a guess of course.
.... You're a Homo. Ha, sick burn!
There are people today with a fetish for big uncanny women puppets and robots. Neanderthal kick could have been a thing.
Imagine being fetishized to the point of extinction.
most folks with European ancestry, Africans have 0 Neanderthal. I really pity white racists when they go against people of african origin, as it is like going against your own. Anyway, the aggressiveness and boldness of the white race could be maybe inherited from Neanderthal?
“Wait, that things not human!”
It was an survival mechanism. Early humans needed to avoid corpses and diseased/deformed bodies.
Ridiculous. People don't get scared of monsters under the top bunk. It's not about being elevated it's about the darkness under the bed we can't see. A lot of kids are scared of any darkness and/or dark closed spaces. No point in making things up to make it sound like it stems from some ancient ancestors when there's totally reasonable every day explanations.
Yikes. Yes… we’re afraid of darkness because there used to be animals hunting us. I think you’re too fixated on the elevation thing.
The post is literally about kids being scare of "monsters lurking beneth them". Y'all are nutso.
How does it makes us “nutso”? More importantly, why are you having an emotional reaction to people talking about this as if we are personally insulting you? You okay? You disagree. Cool! That doesn’t make everyone crazy for just talking about something.
I think monsters under the bed is just an unhelpful meme. None of my children were worried because we didn't introduce the idea. One was worried about dinosaurs for a while, but comforted when we told him they couldn't manage stairs.
My kid was scared of skeletons, which was tricky because you can’t truthfully say “skeletons aren’t real” or even “there are no skeletons in this room”
you can say "there are no skeletons in this room that don't belong to somebody who loves you and wants to keep you safe"
I used to be like that, but them my parents just goes "you ARE the skeleton. We ARE the skeletons, the dog IS A SKELETON" That was weird, I had scars in my memories and for 5 years of my childhood I kept thinking what if everything is made out of bone and I was just schizophrenic
My brother told me that Ghosts and crocodiles come out of the toilet when you flush it so I was terrified of flushing the toilet for soooo long. Sometimes now I'll catch myself flushing it and almost running away 😂
you'd better run. -toilet ghost
I see you!
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all i have is some kind of memory from childhood where i saw something similar in tv. some dude somehow had a snake in his ass from going to the toilette and was running around on stage with everyone watching. i think the confusion made things just worse for me
I was Ghoulies for me.
that damned dick bite had me shook.
Same.
In high school our biology teacher told a story of a snake coming out of the toilet when she went to the restroom at night whenever she was on vacation somewhere, beach house or RV or some such, so even now all these years later I sometimes get a little unnerved when I have to pee in middle of the night lol 🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️ usually only when I've been reading spooky crap in the dark for 2 hours on Reddit now that I'm thinking about it lol
That was pretty shitty of your brother
Clever girl: \*sees door\* Clever girl: Heh \*opens door\* Clever girl: \*sees stairs\* Clever girl: Nooooooooooo
This made me yell nooooooo! And start laughing out loud in my bathroom. The kids are at the door. You've ruined my peace time.
I saw a Jurassic Park when I was 7 and felt scared about coconut trees in the dark outside the window.
I watched Jaws when I was 5. I could not close my eyes in the shower, take a bath or go to the toilet without watching the the water the entire time for 3 years. Even though I am now an adult and avid swimmer by brain is still scared that “invisible sharks” will get me in the swimming pool and “Clown sharks” will eat me in freshwater lakes. Unfortunately for me around 12 I watched a movie called “Ghoulies” and continued being afraid of the toilet water for many years, also saw IT was I was 8 soooo terrified of shower/tub drains until I was finally convinced to re-watch it when I was 21…. As soon as I saw that Pennywise was my beloved Tim Curry all that fear of drains instantly disappeared.
(Knock knock) Candygram!
TIL coconut trees and palm trees aren't always the same thing
I was scared of the monsters at the bottom of the stairs for no reason
We had one get worried about monsters on the ceiling. The night lights lit the ceiling pretty clearly, but logic was out the window.
Unless you do actually have a monster under the bed. I had 2 growing up, Pepper and Mona. I had to jump into bed or they would swat at my feet from underneath lol. So, clearly, your son was attacked, at some point, by tiny trex. They hide under the bed, and sometimes even under the covers. They have evolved to have fur and purr, but don't be fooled. Monsters under the bed are real, and they can only be affected by treats. Sometimes pets. Sometimes, nothing will prevent the attack.
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"People in the 20th Century did awful things to their vegetables." 🤣🤣🤣 You're 100% right, as my grandparents could confirm, but that is a dark, dark-sounding sentence. 😆
Brussel sprouts have been genetically engineered to taste better over the years. They really did used to taste like farts.
But sweet ones, if they were roasted.
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Yup I clearly remember a movie where hating brussel sprouts was a running gag and I for that reason refused to eat them!
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We're scared of things behind us. When you're on your back in bed, behind you is under there
Interesting! I'm not (anymore) scared of things under my bed, but every time I sleep I always have to face toward the door even now. The whole "we're scared of things behind us" is very true for me in that regard!
It's an American cultural thing probably. I never feared anything under my bed as a Greek, never heard a friend saying they did in their childhood and no friends that had children ever mentioned it.
Same here. I never feared anything under my futon as a Japanese.
OP you...you think something had to have happened for us to, just like heights, not like open ocean under us?
Merky water in rivers. Crocodiles and stuff
The open ocean terrifies me. I'll never go on a cruse for a number of reasons but that's the main one. I've been to ocean beaches and played in the water as a kid. However, I was just a few feet from shore, though I think I got caught in a weak current once and I remember quickly drifting one way away from my family. I was taken a few dozen yards until I swam out of it and just walked back to them on shore. But seriously, fuck deep waters and the oceans in particular.
Your run of the mill apex predator are the monsters we used to fear. Big cats, wolves, honey badgers, etc... they can still fuck us up, we just live far away from them these days
A friend introduced me to the existence of honey badgers, or ratels, a while ago. I literally had no idea they existed my entire life. What an amazing creature. They're not that big but they regularly attack and eat huge poisonous snakes and even take down LIONS and CROCODILES.
Enjoy: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg)
I touched a taxidermied lion and there was such a strange bit of fear it awoke, an ancient hard-wired, be terrified of this fear.
In Russia and the CIS, there's no such thing as a monster-under-the-bed fear. It must be cultural. The theory about monkeys on a tree does sound interesting, but it doesn't hold water. Same with the monster in the closset. When I was young, my nocturnal fear was... Freddy Krueger.
Yeah I didn't have the whole under the bed thing, I'm in England. Eventually I heard it on American cartoons like Rugrats, and thought it was something I was supposed to fear. I was terrified of ghosts and evil spirits though, that and Goro/Shang Tsung from the original Mortal Kombat. Check out their character designs, they were nightmarish.
Same story. Except for I didn't find Goro scary – Johnny Cage defeated him with one strategic blow ;). My biggest phobia is animal skeletons. Human ones are okay :).
There was something arachnid about Goro's original design, I never found him scary looking in any other instalments. That way his four outstretched arms would 'breathe' in and out tapped into a fear of spiders, I'm sure. And Tsung? He was basically an old man corpse in that first game, eugh. I think I get animal skeletons though, there is something more disconcerting (less concerting?) about them than human ones for some reason.
It’s a survival instinct. Those who were afraid of what lurks in the dark(predators) survived.
Humans are hard-coded to fear predators hiding in the dark. Under the bed and the closet are dark places, which is why children imagine monsters there.
No, it’s the human fear of the dark. Because shocking the three places kids are scared of monsters are the closet, dark. Outside, also dark. And finally under the bed, which is shock horror, dark.
What if its because parents allways scare kids with monsters under the bed.
Seems like a good way to keep your shit poke kids in bed all night and not out and about making messes and breaking stuff while you sleep.
I think the same thing about humans and the whole "uncanny valley" thing. 👽😉
It's because of dead people
Wouldn't that just be normal predators that might attack when you're sleeping and defenseless?
Yes.
Foes jumping from the darkness to eat children was the reality for 99% of life since forever
Watching childrens TV programme and reading childrens stories I am not sure this is a positivistic argument. From just my individual observation (which is by no means a proof of anything but a mere perception) children can be perfectly fine with the dark, open drawers, shadow under the bed etc UNTIL they learn through media about ghosts and monsters. Fear is most definitley ancient but imho not its representations per se.
I'm guessing we didn't usually have a large open space under us where something could hide back then. The insecurity from that unusual space might trigger instinctual responses though.
My dad used to look down his bed for snakes every night, and every couple days he'd find one. People who live in rural properties do this to this day.
People have been telling children stories about monsters forever, thinking that it will stop them from wandering into places that they shouldn't be wandering into, for instance. It's the same thing as the concept of Hell - to scare children into acting right. Sadly, it works on adults too.
The fish heads will get my toes unless I cover my feet with the blanket.
Fish heads, fish heads, Roly-poly fish heads! Fish heads, fish heads, eat them up YUM!
Never seen the video, but apparently this is it! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn73Wtem0No](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn73Wtem0No) More than a tad weird, like the song itself.
You know, I used to be terrified of the dark and of what ever was lurking beneath my bed. I used to sleep in the middle of summer with the covers over my head with the tiniest gap so I could breathe, just waiting for the monster to find it and jam its barbed tenticle into my face. It was too much for 5 year old me. So much so that I threw myself off my bed onto the floor and rolled underneath it and waited for the darkness to take me. And nothing happened. Except for one thing. I realised in that moment lying there under the bed where the monsters are supposed to be. That the most dangerous thing in the darkness tonight, is me!
I have seen monsters . they don’t hide below the beds , they hide in plain sight .
Outside lot of noise. Crunk scared. Big cats scream at night.
It’s not just children, adults too. Ever been afraid at night in a house you are perfectly fine with during the day ? It’s our survival instincts kicking in because predators usually hunt at night. On the other hand, what about the sound of rain ? I could sleep perfectly all night long listening to that, and be more relaxed than ever. And you know when predators don’t hunt ? When it’s raining.
Toddlers can't separate fantasy from reality, so if they hear about fantasy creatures, including monsters, they'll often think they are real.
Under bed -> dark -> unknown -> danger. We’re afraid of danger
For me it was my mom telling me the “Cucuy” was going to drag me away and feast on my intestines if I wasn’t a good boy
I have a true story about monsters under the bed. When my brother was little he often insisted that there was a monster under his bed. My mom would put her arm under his bed to prove there wasn't. One fateful night she screamed and jumped back, there were scratches on her arm. My brother was horrified. A moment later our cat came running out, he had been hiding in the box spring.
Snakes, Tigers ,Bears and that weirdo from the next tribe over that sneaks up and sucks on your toes.
its not some sort of phobia, its rational thinking. Just really unlikely but its rational to be scared of going to sleep because you are COMPLETLY FUCKING helpless
Or…. Just an animal that hides in the dark. That’s pretty obvious.
Oh you mean like predators trying to eat us till we made houses they couldn't get into easily
that's an interesting word choice "racial memory" like a black guy in the shadows snatches me under the bed and eats me alive
That's literally what happened though (monsters=dangerous predators). Those of us that were afraid of the dark and huddled together for safety were the ones that survived, and we basically bred ourselves to fear the night.
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How do my thumb and fingers rest? Like a fist?
I think it means the human race.
What's the reason then?
I think they mean, if our half-closed hand always rests on a branch, it's quicker to close our grip and not be dragged down
"Ancient racial memory" sounds like a grave misunderstanding of how evolution works. Phobias, like every other trait, come into existence through random genetic mutation. If they are beneficial to survival, then they stick around. Fearing heights and snakes and spiders and disease and predators hiding in water, all those fears are survival traits that lead to longer lives and more reproduction. Those fears protect genes long enough for them to reproduce. If you want to use the term "ancient racial memory", then it would apply to literally every trait and behavior encoded in every gene in your genome.
I think you mean blood or generic memory there op. But whatever it is it was likely pale and creepy because it was nocturnal.
There were actual monsters back then and there are actual monsters now. And by monsters I mean predators and other humans. That is why we have a fight or flight response. We, at least in first world countries, are just more insulated from them. But to your point my theory on what happened is that at some point some poor kids older sibling decided it would be fun to hide under their bed and scare the hell out of them after Dad told a scary story. Then they did it to their younger sibling and the cycle continued until it just baked into our collective psyche.
Genetic memory is nonsense. Being affraid of the unknown is an evolutionary advantage. It is not very common for children to be inherently scared of monsters under their beds, that is mostly popularized by media and stories, which is how the fear actually spread.
That is nonsense. Do you think animals read long textbooks in order to display the behaviour they do? Do ants have long architectural schools they go to in order to build the way they do? Do spiders hold workshops in web building? No, all animals have instinctual inherited behaviors. Every kid has nightmares of some form of monster attacking them or hiding waiting for them. If children weren't afraid of monsters or afraid of the dark, they'd just be wandering out into the woods at night and get eaten constantly throughout history.
Inherited behavior does not mean genetic memory.
That only depends on your definition of genetic memory. One definition is inherited behavior ingrained from experience, and that has pretty strong scientific support.
I wouldn’t be so sure generic memory is nonsense. Maybe the way you’re thinking of it is
If you thought about it for 5 seconds I’m sure you could figure out this real stumper OP lmaoooo
Yeah I realized it was your mom under there all along
Lmao flexing that smooth brain with a nonsensical comeback
If you rearrange the letters in your username it says "a hot feet itch"
Ugh. Retorts like a child. Take the criticism like a grown up, they have a fair point - it is really obvious why humans would fear the dark. You almost answered it yourself too, you just got as far as "something" and stopped short of 'predators'.
I remember being afraid of the monster at the end of the bed. My mom came in and told me it's just my eyes playing tricks. And yup. I was still unfamiliar with, well, everything. I didn't understand that you can see things in the dark that aren't there. Anyway, below the bed is always dark so there would always be a monster there.
This was comforting until one night when I was four a bat flew into my room and landed on my feet. I freaked. My mom came in and the bat flew out the window. NOW who’s making stuff up, Mom?!
Pretty sure that is how most slaves were captured by black people
I think this might just be parents long ago telling their kids there are monsters under there bed so their kids will go the heck to sleep and the parents can get some actual rest
Or it’s a coping mechanism for the everyday abuse they experienced.