i read that wonderful book and didnt know it took him 20+  years to get it right. Best book I have ever read, well written and laid out.

I want to be me, odd strange, slightly left of centre me. Someone who attracts other autists when I sit on a bus, and feel happy when they confide in me that they are autistic, when I knew from the moment they got in. I don't want to be associated too much with 'normals' 'Neurotips' or whatever they call themselves. I feel that comes from my Neanderthal genes, I don't like the possibility that normal people are the neanderthals and that I am just johnny come lately Homosaps. However I would be then having a stronger connection to Africans and I wouldn't mind that.

In science nothing is absolute - except absolute zero (zero degrees Kelvin), probably.

Scientists try hard not to jump to conclusions - think of Darwin and his decades long gestation of his theory of 'Evolution by Natural Selection'.

It is always useful for a valid counterargument to be highlighted.

what do you want to be ?

the word is "suggest" and that "further research" is needed to jump to that conclusion

In the words of Ray Davies of The Kinks:

"I think I'm sophisticated
'Cause I'm living my life
Like a good homo sapiens
But all around me
Everybody's multiplying
And they're walking round like flies, man
So I'm no better than the animals
Sitting in the cages in the zoo, man
'Cause compared to the flowers
And the birds and the trees
I am an apeman."

I don't wanna be human!

There is a New Scientist article that suggests the exact opposite, that neurological divergences like autism, and mental illnesses like schizophrenia, were not found in archaic humans, such as Neanderthals.  See it here: Why we get autism but our Neanderthal cousins didn't | New Scientist

This might indicate that we are very human indeed.

lots of your phenotype is determined my your genotype. Read a book called "the selfish gene" if you want to be awakened to their power

come back K you where so nice

The answer is obviously that we don't know. However does it feel right that we did? Oh yes! I completely love the idea that my condition is a result of my genes, my oddly elongated Neanderthal skull makes sense and so do the family traits. I feel Neanderthal and never felt human. Of course I must have mostly human genes and a small amount of Neanderthal DNA but I feel so much like a slightly different version of human, and feel the family similarity with other autists.

Really that many 150 + genes linked to autism I wonder how many of them may be from neanderthal and Denisovans +15 types of Prehistoric human species? And how many we have from modern man.

Does anyone think environmental pollution may contribute to autism?? 

we essentially have the same genes ( linked to autism ) as our early ancestors which makes sense but it just may not have been expressed in them, or maybe it was. SO we have inherited them from them. But I am not sure what this means right now.

We probably will never know for sure unless we find a tribe somewhere which is essentially one of our ancestors.

It just surprised me how much we know about our ancestors !

At the moment I havent time to stop and do some research on this.

Also my genetic knowledge is way out of date

boy would I like to dive into this ! 

please remember there are some 150+ genes linked to autism

but there are teams out there working on individual groups which is really awesome. 

Feel free to correct me, the published paper was hard for me to read it was very genetically technical. And its only one paper in hundreds.

This is interesting, thanks senior moment. 

Take some of this with a huge pinch of salt. I have my doubts. It sounds just a bit too like the sort of comforting thing that Steve Silberman would have us believe about us being part of the future. Although the obvious shift in the technical ability of the artists is most interesting. i seem to remember reading somewhere that some psychologists view these caves as sort of dream sites/meditation chambers in which artists could achieve higher levels of consciousness and depictive ability. I can easily relate to that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_painting

"A 2018 study claimed an age of 64,000 years for the oldest examples of (non-figurative) cave art in Iberia, which would imply production by Neanderthals rather than modern humans."

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/prehistoric-autism-cave-paintings-barry-wright-penny-spikins-university-of-york-a8351751.html

Prehistoric autism helped produce much of the world's earliest great art, study says

medium.com/.../the-15-types-of-human-species-discovered-till-date-4d1eb036ba46

www.discovermagazine.com/.../20-things-you-didnt-know-about-neanderthals

I do feel like there is some merit to the idea everytime I look into it I feel more that its a possibility. 

I think how cool would it be to have such ancient DNA be so prominent in me?

I often too wondered if memories in some part are stored in DNA and that one day we could see through our ancestors eyes. 

Wonderful concept I think, in this world there is an abundance of variety that makes anything possible. 

Author Summary

Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are neurodevelopmental disorders that affect 1 in 88 individuals in the United States. Many gene mutations have been associated with autism; however, they explain only a small part of the genetic cause for this disorder. One gene that has been linked to autism is AUTS2. AUTS2 has been shown to be disrupted in more than 30 individuals with ASDs, both in coding and noncoding sequences (regions of the gene that do not encode for protein). However, its function remains largely unknown. We show here that AUTS2 is important for neuronal development in zebrafish. In addition, we characterize potential AUTS2 regulatory elements (DNA sequences that instruct genes as to where, when, and at what levels to turn on) that reside in noncoding regions that are mutated in ASD individuals. AUTS2 was also shown to be implicated in human evolution, having several regions where its human sequence significantly changed when compared to Neanderthals and non-human primates. Here, we identified four mouse enhancers within these evolving regions, two of which are expressed in the brain.

https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1003221

u may be on to something :)