Human suspicion of realistic robots and avatars may have earlier origins than previously thought.
The phenomenon, called the uncanny valley, describes the disquiet caused by synthetic people which almost, but not quite, match human expressiveness.
Experiments with macaque monkeys show they too are suspicious of replicas that fall short of the real thing.
The research suggests a deep-seated evolutionary origin for the reactions such artificial entities evoke.
More at BBC : Early origins for uncanny valley
