Homo sapiens were quite unremarkable until they met the highly sophisticated Neanderthals. Assimilating the Neanderthal led to the Upper Palaeolithic Revolution and the emergence of modern humans since it caused a drastic increase in Homo sapiens’ brain size and consequently brought about their rapid evolution by combining the creativity, resourcefulness and inquisitive spirit of Neanderthals, who were of an individual nature, with the ambition and networking skills of Homo sapiens, who were of a social nature.

Since the Neanderthal assimilation most Homo sapiens have retained their predominantly social nature and therefore tend to ostracise those of a predominantly individual nature who, beginning in the 1940s, are being pathologised with the label of autism.

However, human progress is driven by autistic individuals because of their original thinking, lack of conformity, immunity to group dynamics and peer pressure, scepticism of authority and discontentment with the status quo.

A person qualifies for an autism diagnosis when they, due to the nature of their Neanderthal DNA and the resulting traits, exceed the level of individuality tolerated by society.

The Autistic Neanderthal Theory is the only unifying theory of autism since it is able to explain every facet as well as the heterogeneity of autism.

In the past most people considered Neanderthals somewhat like a parody of mankind, the hillbillies of the Upper Pleistocene. Today we know better, or at least we should.

The bias against them has led most scientists so far to look at the facts and interpret them unfavourably for the Neanderthals, and archaeologists tend to attribute inventions and milestones to them only if nobody else was around at the time. Furthermore, Neanderthals are only being compared to modern humans (who are the result of our interbreeding), never to their Homo sapiens contemporaries, in order to justify the notion of their inferiority. But the more evidence emerges, the more difficult it becomes to portray these people, who happened to have a larger brain than any other hominins (including ourselves), as naive savages.
Feeling the need for a word to describe the unjustified notion of supremacy within collective identities (in this case Homo sapiens), I coined the term nosocentrism (from Latin nos, meaning 'we', and centrum).

Neanderthals emerged in modern-day Spain 430,000 years ago and spread over most of Eurasia. This coincides with the Marine Isotope Stage 11, an interglacial that began 424,000 years ago and during which temperatures in Europe became less hostile for humans. The interglacial lasted for 50,000 years after which the next glacial period gripped the continent.
Even though the physique of the Neanderthals had made them more resistant to cold weather, human life in these conditions would have been impossible without clothes, and an animal hide thrown across one’s shoulders simply wouldn’t do the trick.
The oldest bone tools for smoothing leather were found at Castel di Guido near present-day Rome and dated to 400,000 years ago. Back then only Neanderthals and Homo heidelbergensis were around, and there is no indication in the fossil record of the latter ever having worn clothes. Furthermore, it appears that Neanderthals evolved from Homo heidelbergensis, so these tools most certainly were made by either Neanderthals or proto-Neanderthals.

The Schöningen spears, found in present-day Germany and also made by Neanderthals or proto-Neanderthals between 400,000 and 300,000 years ago, already demonstrate the cognitive abilities and co-operative skills they would later pass on to modern humans.

Neanderthals looked after their sick and old (demonstrating that they had already evolved beyond capitalism) and buried their dead. There are also indications they might have laid them to rest with gifts or flowers, and the Shanidar Cave in Kurdistan is thought to be a Neanderthal graveyard.
It appears that Homo sapiens learnt to bury their dead from Neanderthals (who already did so at least 130,000 years ago, but who possibly had continued the practice from their direct ancestors throughout their existence).
The earliest known burials of Homo sapiens took place around 100,000 years ago in the Qafzeh and Es Skhul Caves in the Levant, an area they would have shared with Neanderthals, by a group who preceded the large out-of-Africa migration by tens of thousands of years. They may simply have copied the custom from their neighbours, as well as their Mousterian industry, but there is more to it. Although classified as Homo sapiens in the meantime, they were initially believed to be Neanderthals due to their distinct Neanderthal features, such as their brow ridges and projecting facial profiles. This suggests that these people were already the result of interbreeding, and their disappearance would indicate either assimilation by Neanderthals or their return to Africa due to the cooling climate. The second scenario would also account for the presence of Neanderthal DNA in African populations. (Unfortunately it hasn’t been possible to extract DNA from them to settle the question of their species.)

While vegetables seem to have been a regular side dish, Neanderthals were carnivores who specialised in big game such as bison, mammoths, lions and bears. Many of them lived in the mountains where they cornered herd animals from which they chose their prey. Some of them were also quite partial to seafood, including dolphins and seals.
They were also the first known hominins to have employed complex cooking methods, involving multiple ingredients and several steps of food preparation.

Of course coordinating ambushes requires organisation, and organisation requires complex language. Fortunately their hyoid bone was located in a similar position to ours, and their FOXP2 gene was identical to ours, which means they not only had the need but also the ability to speak in full sentences - once again, long before Homo sapiens even came into existence. This similar gene variation is usually explained by crediting it to the last common ancestor; however, since it is only present in modern humans and not in pre-contact Homo sapiens, it is more likely that we inherited it directly from the Neanderthals.

Their stone tools were of the Mousterian class from which they developed the Châtelperronian industry, and they also may have used projectile spears; it seems they produced wooden tools as well which, sadly, don’t fossilise. In 2005 it was discovered that in order to attach stone spearheads to wooden shafts, or knives to handles, they developed a strong adhesive from the heated bark of birch trees in a technique that has not been duplicated with the resources available to them until 2023, making them the first known people to have employed chemical synthesis at least 200,000 years ago.

They lit fires (in contrast, there is no evidence of Homo sapiens having been able to make fire, rather than merely use and control it, prior to Neanderthal contact), and while most of the known Neanderthals lived in caves, some of them constructed tents from mammoth bones. They also cleared forests for settlements.

The Neanderthals were artists and appreciated beauty. They adorned themselves with jewellery, ornaments and feathers and created cave art.

Neanderthals are the inventors of string, hearths, herbal remedies, the lissoir, make-up, the hashtag and the world’s first musical instrument, a bone flute (and this is what it sounded like).

In the recently discovered Bruniquel Cave in France, in a chamber not reached by sunlight, Neanderthals had constructed two ring structures from stalagmites around 176,000 years ago, demonstrating that they not only were able to build but also had developed a means of artificial lighting. The purpose of the structures is still debated; one possible explanation is that they were built by two families who spent their nights away from the glacial temperatures outside and who built them to protect their privacy as well as to keep the heat of their fireplaces in. Traces of fire on top of the stalagmites also indicate that they may have been used for illumination purposes.

It also appears that Neanderthals were the first human seafarers, at least 100,000 years ago. Their Mousterian tools have been discovered on Crete, an island that is separated from the mainland by 40 km of open sea (even during glacial periods).
With this in mind it might be worth considering the possibility of Neanderthals having crossed the Strait of Gibraltar into Africa; this would be another possible explanation for the presence of Neanderthal DNA in African populations as well as for the fact that interbreeding of the two species already occurred 100,000 years ago, long before Homo sapiens left Africa. (Imagine the Neanderthals in Gibraltar: an inquisitive, adventurous and seafaring people who could see another continent across the water. It is almost impossible to believe they didn't explore it.)

In the Contrebandiers Cave at the coast of present-day Morocco, dated to between 120,000 to 90,000 years ago, a number of bone tools for the processing of clothes, including one made from a cetacean tooth, were discovered which are highly reminiscent of Neanderthal technology, even though researchers assume they were produced by Homo sapiens. However, back then consistent use of formal bone tools was quite rare amongst Homo sapiens, and the presence of sea mammal remains in sediments associated with Homo sapiens in North Africa was unheard of.
One possibility is that some Neanderthals indeed crossed the strait of Gibraltar into Africa where they may have shared their technology with local Homo sapiens and gradually been absorbed into their population. Another possibility is that these tools were made by Homo sapiens who had already met Neanderthals, probably in the Levant, and learned their technology.

We (i.e. modern humans) tend to believe that early Homo sapiens shared our traits of adaptability and resilience, but in fact only a few of them did. With the Marine Isotope Stage 6, the ice age took a grip on Africa 195,000 years ago, leaving most of the continent uninhabitable and killing off the vast majority of Homo sapiens. All living humans descend from one female survivor of that bottleneck event ('Mitochondrial Eve') who, according to genetic evidence, lived around 150,000 years ago; all other Homo sapiens lineages went extinct.

Between 57,000 and 48,000 years ago (when the Sahara became inhabitable and traversable again) the first Homo sapiens arrived in Europe. They are the only known diaphoraphobic species, and they probably were already used to killing off any people who were different from them - and it is most likely that they had to flee to Europe during the peak of the ice age because they had been displaced by other Homo sapiens themselves.
Yet Homo sapiens, who had not significantly evolved at that stage, would not have stood a chance against those who already inhabited the area: Neanderthals were physically stronger, familiar with the terrain, had advanced technologies and knew how to survive in a frozen world approaching another low in global temperatures. Fortunately for the newcomers they were also more welcoming of different cultures than Homo sapiens.
Therefore it is most likely (albeit difficult to imagine in today’s world) that both parties established friendly relationships and joined forces right from the start.
The Neanderthals would have taught Homo sapiens how to hunt, gather food, light fires, build shelters and make clothes and tools, and the large numbers of Homo sapiens would have made their hunts of large prey such as mammoths more effective.
Not all Homo sapiens who arrived in Europe were lucky enough to cross paths with Neanderthals, though, and those who didn't found themselves unable to cope with the harsh conditions and went extinct.
Generally, even in this day and age and despite the information we have now, Neanderthals are still played off against Homo sapiens when facts are presented, despite growing evidence that they weren’t competitors but collaborators and lovers. We know that all of today’s humans have Neanderthal ancestors. Taking into account that the overall Neanderthal population was quite small (it is estimated that Homo sapiens outnumbered them 10:1), it is reasonable to conclude that they were entirely assimilated into Homo sapiens (seeing that such a small group found their way into all our DNA suggests they must have been quite attractive), to the benefit of both (well, maybe not so much for the Neanderthal): combining the creativity, resourcefulness and inquisitive spirit of the Neanderthals with the ambition and networking skills of Homo sapiens led to the Great Leap Forward (also known as the Upper Palaeolithic Revolution), an unstoppable force that conquered the world, beginning with the Cro-Magnon culture 45,000 years ago. Around the same time modern humans also acquired their current brain organisation.

The Aurignacian Industry which started around 43,000 years ago demonstrates a drastic advance in toolmaking and artistic expression, including the first figurines.
Scientists assume that this industry was the work of modern humans, and while I agree that post-contact Homo sapiens are the most likely suspects, I imagine that it started out as a collaboration of Neanderthals with those who had already commenced to assimilate them. After all, cultural exchange boosts creativity by combining different ideas, skills and knowledge.

The fact that all living humans carry Neanderthal DNA does not mean that Neanderthal genes reached all populations of Homo sapiens; it merely proves that only populations with Neanderthal DNA survived. It appears that Neanderthals saved Homo sapiens from extinction.
(Considering that modern humans, due to the Neanderthal assimilation, are entirely different from the misnamed extinct pre-contact Homo sapiens, it might be time to rename the latter in order to distinguish them from us, maybe as Homo socialis.)
There are two possible reasons for the extinction of populations without Neanderthal genes. The first is that they simply weren't adaptable enough to survive in the long run, like many other hominins. The second is that, due to Homo sapiens' genocidal nature, different populations killed each other off, and that those with Neanderthal ancestors prevailed because of their intellectual advantage.
And it is not the amount of Neanderthal DNA we carry that matters but the type of it; what makes the intellectual difference between pre-contact Homo sapiens and modern humans could be down to a handful of Neanderthal genes, or even less.

Assimilating the Neanderthal caused a dramatic increase in the brain size of Homo sapiens. However, after the last Neanderthal had been assimilated, Homo sapiens only had each other to reproduce with; this has led to the ongoing gradual decrease of their brain size since the Cro-Magnons or EEMH (European early modern humans). And while some scientists take a size-doesn’t-matter-unless-mine-is-larger attitude, others are concerned about this.

There are many aspects of Neanderthals that are reminiscent of autism. They preferred to live in very small groups that had little or no contact with each other, they had a significantly larger occipital lobe which gave them greater visual and pattern-recognising abilities, and they were less social than Homo sapiens (‘We have a social brain, whereas Neanderthals appear to have a visual brain’ - Clive Gamble). They had larger brains, came up with original solutions to problems they faced (see the paragraph on inventions) and smoked and dried meat which they probably stored to live on until the next herd of big game came along, corresponding to the common autistic trait of hoarding.

The study of mirror neurons is still in its infancy. Mirror neurons are present in all primates and are responsible for our abilities to imitate and emphasise with others. However, in autistic persons these neurons appear to come with rationality and privacy filters: while mainstream people tend to copy an entire action, regardless of the necessity of the individual steps, autistic people tend to leave out all steps they know to be superfluous - and while they have the same (if not a higher) sensitivity to the sufferings of others (even those who don't share their collective identity, a trait I call 'empathy beyond affiliation') as well as their own pain, they are less likely to express their emotions and share their feelings.
As it is implausible that millions of autistic individuals independently develop a new type of mirror neuron, the cause must be sought in the past. I propound that the differences are a result of separate developments after Neanderthal and Homo sapiens split from the last common ancestor.
The Neanderthals lived in one of the coldest environments imaginable, and even though their physique helped them to adapt to the climate, the conservation of energy must have been a major concern. Therefore the performing of unnecessary actions would have created an evolutionary disadvantage. Imagine a father showing his sons how to kill a deer and dancing ten times around the carcass before slicing it up; the son who cut out the dance in his own hunts would have had a better chance of survival, and that’s the reason the Neanderthals developed the rationality filter.
In the meantime Homo sapiens became more social and started sharing their feelings with others, a trait that was not present in the last common ancestor and therefore not in Neanderthals, either.
Furthermore, eye contact (which tends to reduce people’s focus) is considered a sign of aggression by many primates, and it is likely that this applied to the last common ancestor and Neanderthals as well. Amongst Homo species the use of eye contact as a social tool beyond the purpose of threatening and asserting dominance is probably unique to Homo sapiens; however, in competitive environments it is still used for exactly this purpose.
Also, Homo sapiens developed synaptic pruning which enables them to filter out sensory input but also impacts their ability to connect information that's not relevant to their collective identities.

And while Homo sapiens back then, just like most modern humans, were of a social nature, Neanderthals, just like autistic people, were of an individual nature. Although our lacking social nature is considered a disorder by most, it also brings with it an increased ability for independent and creative thinking (‘thinking outside the box’), recognition of patterns, spatial intelligence, attention to detail, focus, scepticism of authority figures, immunity to peer pressure, group dynamics and opinion packages and a lot more - all the properties that brought mankind out of the Stone Age. In his Solitary Forager Hypothesis the author argues that this autism advantage may have been useful in the past; however, mankind would take a great leap backward if these abilities were to disappear. As I pointed out in this article, ‘It’s our failure to conform to society, it’s our failure to think the way others think, it’s our failure to subscribe to group dynamics and groupthink, it’s our failure to give in to peer pressure, it’s our failure to blindly follow tradition, it’s our failure to unquestioningly obey authority, and it’s our failure to accept the status quo that have driven human progress for tens of thousands of years, thanks to autistic individuals who successfully resisted attempts at being mainstreamed.’
The more children are conditioned to suppress their individual identities and subjected to authoritarian parenting or behavioural conversion 'therapies' such as Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA), the more the potential for future human progress is being reduced. If autism were eliminated, as some people wish, mankind would enter a period of stagnation followed by permanent severe regression.
On the other hand, just imagine what the world could look like if autistic people were accepted and given equal opportunities, enabling them to develop their full potential for the benefit of all.
In my Deindividuation Resister Hypothesis (which I developed 4 years after the Autistic Neanderthal Theory) I argue that this intellectual potential is present in all children at birth but reduced by social conditioning, and that autism is merely a social construct for those who resist (or aren't subjected to) social conditioning. (Abstract: 'All children are born with individual identities, but almost all of them undergo social conditioning and are forced to take on collective identities instead. Human progress is driven by people who resist social conditioning [or are not subjected to it in the first place] and retain their individual identities at the cost of being ostracised and pathologised while those who identify collectively provide the network to spread it.')

In 2017 a study explored how Neanderthal DNA affects the personality of humans with a high Neanderthal Quotient. While the study was driven by assumptions I consider faulty (once again, Neanderthals are being compared to modern humans rather than their Homo sapiens contemporaries), the results show that people with a high NQ are more likely to display (amongst other traits) autistic tendencies, depressive tendencies and social fear. These three have the same source.
Due to our individual nature we are unable to fulfil society's unreasonable social expectations (while never knowing what to expect from society ourselves), and as a consequence we experience ostracisation, discrimination and pathologisation. This naturally leads to social anxiety and depression.

Neanderthal DNA (besides possibly that of other archaic humans) causing resistance to social conditioning (i.e. autism and related neurological orientations) would mean that we all are indeed, as some people claim and science has demonstrated, ‘a little autistic’, on a spectrum that ranges from extremely individual humans to extremely social ones. Basically, our inner Neanderthal tells us to do the sensible thing while our inner Homo sapiens tells us to do what everybody else is doing or what we are told to do (which, going by the consistent results of the Milgram Experiment, is the choice of two thirds of all people). It is no coincidence that autism was first pathologised in Nazi-occupied Austria and the United States in the early 1940s, in countries and at a time that saw the ruthless enforcement of conformity and compliance and the perception of individual expression as an act of treason or a sign of mental illness. (And the more the world slides back into authoritarianism, the more people will be diagnosed with autism.)

The Autistic Neanderthal Theory is the only unifying theory of autism as it explains why there is not a single autistic trait that is present in all autistic individuals.

Looking at our closest living relatives, the bonobo and the chimpanzee, it is intriguing to see that the former seems to be obsessed with socialising while the latter is more interested in objects. Despite their genetic makeup being almost identical, they display very different behaviour, with the bonobo focussing on interaction and the chimpanzee on tools; it’s almost like an ape version of Homo sapiens and Neanderthal. Ironically, it was a bonobo who recently was reported to display autistic behaviour; I have contacted the research centre and asked about the possibility of a recent chimpanzee ancestor, but they didn’t grace me with a reply.

Around 1980: Having studied Neanderthals and ancient humans, I concluded that the mysteriously large brain size of Cro-Magnon humans and the subsequent Great Leap Forward must have been the result of interbreeding with Neanderthals who had the largest brain size of all known hominins and who lived in Eurasia at the same time. However, even if I had been in a position to publicise my theory, nobody would have taken me seriously since scientists back then categorically believed that the two species weren't able to interbreed.

2013-2014: After realising that I am autistic, I tried to figure out what exactly autism is by looking for something all of us have in common. However, I had to find out that all of us are entirely different from each other - more different, in fact, than mainstream people are from each other. And eventually it dawned on me that autistic people have a predominantly individual nature as opposed to others’ predominantly social nature.
During my research I also came across Leif Ekblad’s Neanderthal Theory from 2001; yet, since he merely pointed out a few similarities, he failed to convince me, and so I didn’t pay too much attention to it at the time.

2017: An article about Neanderthals which pointed out that they were more advanced than formerly believed rekindled my interest in them. Almost four decades after first studying them, I now had the Internet, allowing me to locate more information than I could as a teenager.
The more I read about them, the more I noticed similarities with autistic people, in particular their individual nature. At this time we knew that interbreeding had occurred, and I proposed that Neanderthal DNA must be responsible for our individual nature, i.e. autism.

I've always been sceptical of the 'sub-Saharan exception'. As soon as Neanderthal DNA was discovered in modern humans, it became a mantra in statements like 'All living humans outside of (sub-Saharan) Africa carry Neanderthal DNA.' Naturally, I tried to find out more about people without Neanderthal DNA, but the Internet didn't supply any answers, and institutes and scientists didn't reply to my emails.
I still felt I had to address the possibility and suggested research into whether any person without Neanderthal DNA ever received an autism diagnosis.

2020: A study was published that demonstrates that the amount of Neanderthal DNA in African populations had been largely underestimated, and that all living humans carry Neanderthal DNA, thus eliminating the elusive sub-Saharan exception.

2021: The fact that self-respecting autistics tend to be liberals helped me realise that people who identify individually are prone to be progressive while those who identify collectively are usually conservative. From this observation I developed the model of the Neurological Spectrum between individual and collective identity.
Afterwards it dawned on me that no child could possibly be born with a collective identity and that collective identities are the result of social conditioning, and it became clear to me that people who identify individually have, at least to some degree, resisted the conditioning process. This led to my Deindividuation Resister Hypothesis in which I argue that human progress is initiated by those who identify individually (at the cost of being ostracised and pathologised) while those who identify collectively provide the network to spread it (which is why in modern humans evolution combined the Neanderthals' abilities to care, to think and to create with ancient Homo sapiens' ability to network).

© 6221 + 6258 RT (1980 + 2017 CE) by Frank L. Ludwig

---

---

Read more about Autism

---

Home | Poems | Plays | Short Stories | Essays | Children's Stories | Children's Poems | German | Photographs | Autism Appreciation