Why Are People Afraid of Spiders
According to psychologists, spiders are an evolutionarily persistent ancestral hazard that humans are especially attuned to. Our ancestors in Africa with these creatures for millions of years, and we had to know that spider bites were extremely dangerous. The findings were published in Evolution and Human Behavior last year.
Our visual system could have kept the ancestral mechanisms. We fear snakes, spiders, etc… because our ancestors had to be aware of them. Amber fossil specimens is the sister genus to the widow spiders we know today. They dated back to 40 million years ago.
