Artificial humans were always there, moving and sleeping amongst us. Their first traces are in the ancient myths of Prometheus and Pygmalion. In the eighteenth century they took the form of mechanical dolls, forerunners of the hi-tech Japanese robots of our own day produced in the engineering labs of Waseda and Osaka Universities. The authors follow the track of these humanoid constructs through various countries and across more than two thousand years of history, reflecting on the ideas that spawned them (Descartes, Leibniz, LaMettrie) and the social, technological and medical developments that accompanied and to a great extent explain them.