the phenomena of the “uncanny valley” suggests that our ancestors needed to beware of something that seemed human, but wasn’t.Spoopy answer
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It's obviously the fae.
Less spoopy answer
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I read somewhere that the answer is dead bodies, since they're biohazards.
The native people I'm descended from had the "wendigo" and the theory was it was a cautionary legend about cannibals with prion diseases.
I read a dissertation on wendigo sickness written by someone married into a Cree family that spent a lot of time living in the bush. His take, which was very interesting, was that the idea of the wendigo was a way to talk about killing someone who was ill when the group was in a starvation situation. Sick people still had to eat, but couldn't help get food, and also had to be tended to by someone else who then couldn't look for food.
The northern fur trade created a bunch of changes in how people lived in the north, in particular it incentived more people to stay further north in the winter. Starvation became more frequent, and so did the wendigo killings. If I remember right the victims were generally very sick people.
It's an interesting topic and it doesn't seem that there's much written about it that isn't really lurid (I confess, that's what piqued my interest).
I want to read about the prion disease angle.
Edit: To be clear, I have no cultural connection to the wendigo phenomenon and have no way to evaluate what anyone has to say about it. I'm just interested in how people live in the northern boreal forest.
After some additional reading I suggest you do not get into the habit of eating human brains.
That's super interesting, when I was young the bedtime scary stories of "they look like people but do not act like people" got to me, so the whole uncanny valley always makes me think of the wendigo
Edit: also the Cree were pretty close to the Ojibwe, considered allies, there might be some lore crossover. I remember my dad telling me about how some Cree family moved into the duplex and my grandpa called them "cousins"
It could be less specific than that. Anything can be uncanny and off-putting if it's slightly different than what we expect it to be. It might not be a specific reaction to seeing deformed human faces, but just the general reaction to something we expect to look familiar looking "wrong".
Nature is full of camouflaging organisms, so it could be that: a strong aversion instinct to camouflaged things which can be threatening. False-eye camouflages give me a similar uncanny valley feeling to androids.
Could also have to do with rejecting deformed offspring like others have mentioned.
Rejecting deformed, sick, or injured people was certainly not universal. There's a very, very old skeleton of a person who had severe congenital deforimities and was likely unable to walk any real distance. This was at a time when humans were semi-nomadic as a rule. But she lived to, at the very least, be an adult (determining age from skeletons is tricky). This implies that her community carried her and brought back food for her when foraging her whole life, despite her being "unfit". She also had several cavities, something that was very rare at the time. We'll never know, but a few people have suggested that perhaps her friends and family were bringing her honey they had foraged, that she would be unable to acquire herself.
this is what the
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fey
want you to think
open your eyes !
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but not so hard so you can see them on the corner of your eyesight thats when they get ya
wanna throw one out for non-homo sapiens hominids. That also might be why you get the "smash / kill" feeling when the uncanny valley kicks in
I saw a writing prompt where the witch was like "one of these is the baby you wished for, the other is a changling! This is the price I was promised! You must choose!" And the mom is like "fuck that action, I'ma wisdom of Solomon that shit" and just grabbed both babies and raised them as siblings.
'I must choose eh? But you didn't say when or how!' and so the mother created an elaborate scheme to obfuscate her words, raising both children thereafter, until her death. Centuries later, the witch returns, using chatgpt to break the cipher she can now claim the lives of one half of this quiet little gaelic village.
Only question is... which half?
I love all the exact words legalistic pedantry in folk tales and myths. "We agreed that you could have his head, not that you could harm his neck!"
I live for that sort of thing. I call it the Literary Occasionalist school of magic. Figures prominently in any tabletop I play. Recently played a videogame where
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An evil witch took over a temple and used it as a base of operations. You need to pursue her, but here's the dilemma. The witch put a hex on the nice introverted priest, if anyone trespasses into the inner sanctum the priest dies. Now, as it happens I was a 'trickster' so I'm into bullshit magic. So I say 'well this is technically your temple innit, just ordain me into the evil cult and i won't be trespassing nothing'. And it works.
There isn't a ton of content like that in the game but what we had was really fun. Especially towards the end.
