(Credit: Shutterstock) "Snakes, why'd it have to be snakes?" so sayeth Indiana Jones, and so, apparently, say babies too. In a study published Wednesday in Frontiers in Psychology, European neuroscientists determined that our instinctive fears of snakes and spiders are so primal, even babies become alarmed at the sight of them. How'd they figure it out? Well, they scared some babies. For science!
Primal Fear Though not everyone is frightened of the two creepy crawlies, studies have shown more than a third of the child population and adult population have a strong dislike of them, and they’re the most reported specific phobias. Even though venomous spiders and snakes aren’t a huge problem for most of us now, they’re still “ancestral threats” our primate ancestors had to deal with for millions of years. It’s possible we’ve evolved too quickly to recognize — and appropriately freak out over — such threats. Scientists ...
