I’m not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens.

Yeah, this one is pretty easily explainable. It's sort of the opposite of pareidolia - the brain's tendency to assign meaning to patterns. Which is why we can find "faces" in inanimate objects (like car headlights and knots in trees). With animatronics, dolls, etc, we see a realistic looking face, but something is missing. Something doesn't fit the pattern. And I don't think most people would describe it as terrifying (unless you have an actual phobia in this area). It's just unsettling or creepy.

It surely helped avoiding diseases

More like it's built into our DNA to 'fear' defects that skew from what we recognize as a normal, healthy human.

Other hominids... diseased.... strangers... corpses... lots of reasons.

"Uncanny valley" is a hypothesis in robotics made in 1970. It's not a biological trait and definitely doesn't imply anything least like humans subconsciously "fear an ancient humanlike alien".

This reminds me of all AI generated art that is becoming increasingly popular like: "What Disney Princesses Look Like in Real-Life." AI always makes the features look too perfect or one feature is exaggerated so much that is looks inhuman. BoredPanda recently had a thread with AI generated Harry Potter portraits and it was definitely veering toward the uncanny valley.

This doesn't surprise me. We're on a list of I think 7 human species, and we're the ones that made it to the present. If you count Hominids then there's like 21 in total I believe as it stands right now. So yeah - there were 6 different humans that didn't look exactly like us human but were still human that our ancestors interacted with, boinked, and probably was responsible for murking to extinction. Now I don't know if we interacted with the other hominids - because they can't find the missing link as to if we came from one of them or not - but they lived too.

I wonder if this is why the people in Polar Express were so unsettling to me.

yeah they were called neanderthals.

i am downright terrified by that fact.it means there could have been an unknown predator,that is now extinct that looked like us,but not...bone chilling!

Ancient aliens....?...

Could this play a factor in why racism exists?

sex doll

Like aliens?

My first guess is that it is a side affect of our animal level instinct to avoid diseased, malformed or deceitful humans. We sense something is wrong on an instinctual level even if we don't know why. Eventually as humanoid robots become more common we will learn to ignore our instincts just has we have with dealing with the sick and handicapped. Our intelligence over-rides our animal instincts where those instincts are no longer relevant.

Politicians??

They don't make me uncomfortable. I'm fascinated by them

However, I think "she's" particularly attractive, for an AI

It does not imply this at all

Like my former manager

Hmm. I wonder if this is related to the eye spots on the back of tigers ears. I mean eyespots are to make potential predators wary of attacking a tiger. So what made us afraid of the uncanny and scared the tigers enough to evolve a defense?

utter nonsense. it's kinda not "right", so it could be a disease. nothing more to it.

All this has happened before. All this will happen again.

Aliens

Politicians ?

Aliens. ;)

Like Trump? Utterly terrifying and somehow just doesn't look quite human enough to pass for one.

Oh. Great. Thanks. I just won’t sleep tonight.