Neanderthal DNA has been implicated in autism

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All of those ethnic groups have Neanderthal ancestry, it's not limited to those of non-African decent, it's not limited to whoever you'd define as white.

https://www.science.org/content/article ... erthal-dna

Last edited by funeralxempire on 19 May 2024, 12:41 am, edited 2 times in total.

So, educate them about Neanderthals. Who doesn't love an excuse to infodump on strangers?

That isn't grunts. That's Klingon.

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Last edited by Jakki on 19 May 2024, 5:14 am, edited 1 time in total.

Even that isnt so simple.

Fifty years ago it would be an insult to be called "a Neanderthal". Because low brow non scientists think of Neanderthals as being "ape like" and "cave men". In reality they were more sophisticated than previous hominids, did not knucklewalk, and had the same tool culture as anatomical moderns for the first 200 thousand years both groups existed. And our AM ancestors only streaked ahead of them in the last 40 thousand years to create a more sophisticated tool set...and even then the Neanderthals actually managed to "reverse engineer" some of our technology to fight back. But I digress.

When you first began hearing about scientists finding trace Neanderthal DNA in modern people...but finding more in some races than in others...my first thought was oh great...reverse racist angry Black Afrocentrists will jump on this to claim that Whites are inferior because Whites are (in a sense) "more Neanderthal than Africans".

But what actually happened was the opposite...White, Right Wing, racists, jumped on it to prove that Whites are somehow superior to Africans, and "are closer to Neanderthals than to subsaharan Africans".

Never expected non anthropologists to brag about themselves "being Neanderthal". But thats what a number White racists have done (including a one time WP member -who got banned years ago).

Oh...and some years after White racists were setting up websites bragging about Neanderthal heritage...one group of people DID join the party late...to do the old fashioned thing...of using "Neanderthal" as an epithet...those folks (on UTube often) were...reverse racists radical angry Afrocentrists Blacks! Just as I predicted...but later to the party than I expected.

As I said in my last post, genetically autism is insanely complicated and everybody's gonna be at least a little, if not a lot, different from the next person-- both in terms of how that autism is expressed but also in etiology. So, for instance, some people have rare monogenic (single gene) forms of autism that are associated with various syndromes, like Fragile X Syndrome, Tuberous Sclerosis, Angelman Syndrome, Lowe Oculocerebrorenal Syndrome, Lubs Syndrome, Retts, Noonans... the list goes on and on. I wrote a paper a few years ago studying these forms of autism, most of which also have some significant intellectual disability alongside: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychiatry/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2018.00535/full. They tend to be in the minority of the spectrum, BUT some of them get studied a lot because the genetics is so simple, which is just an easier scenario in which to study autism. So, some researchers do take that route.

Other forms of autism are associated with in utero teratogens, like infections, maternal diabetes, or even drug exposures (e.g., alcohol, valproic acid).

But the vast majority of folks on the spectrum are likely to have multifactorial, extremely complicated etiologies. From the genetics standpoint, that typically means a whole bunch of small genetic factors are adding up and, together, result in autism or perhaps other "brands" of neurodiversity. It is most likely that some DNA inherited from hybridization with Neanderthals is playing a small role in some peoples' autism, which is what our study suggests (and we're going to continue to study it to try and understand it better). But, again, this is only one part of a much larger, insanely complex story. These are not typically going to be genetic variants that will lead to autism 100% of the time. They're not what one would call "major effect" variants. These are going to be minor effect variants that are going to increase the likelihood autism will pop up, but are no guarantee. But, it does seem that they affect a significant minority of the broader autism spectrum, which makes this knowledge potentially useful.

But I 100% agree with you that this is not "THE" cause of autism. Anybody who peddles that kind of story isn't doing science, they're just selling a story. I promise you, there are many other similar weak genetic variants that were not inherited from Neanderthals that are also undoubtedly playing roles in peoples' autism.



Yeah, exactly. Everybody today's got a little. A subset of the Afroasiatic population migrated further out into Eurasia, intermixed with Neanderthals, and then a subset of the population migrated back into Africa and brought that ancestry indirectly to the rest of the African continent. So, everybody today has some Neanderthal DNA, although people of African descent generally have the lowest amount because they didn't directly intermix (at least according to current paleoanthropological understanding).

But in our study, we matched autistic people with similar population controls. We studied black non-Hispanics, white Hispanics, and white non-Hispanics and each of those autism groups, on average, had more rare Neanderthal DNA than the ethnically-matched non-autistics. So, for example, even black autistic Americans still had more rare Neanderthal DNA than black non-autistic/allistic Americans-- even though BOTH groups had less Neanderthal DNA compared to the white groups. Granted, when we looked at specific SNPs that were enriched in these three groups, the same SNPs weren't implicated-- so there's some cool population-specific things going on, which we're super excited to continue to study.

On top of that, concepts surrounding the humanness of Neanderthals have been rapidly changing in the paleoanthropological community since 2010 when the first Neanderthal genome sequence was published, along with the bombshell that our genomes still house some Neanderthal DNA. And those changing concepts are starting to float out into the non-professional communities (racist agendas aside).

On the other hand, I'm also trying to make clear in publicity about the article that autistic people don't have more Neanderthal DNA in general. That's not what we found. We found autistic people, on average, have more rare Neanderthal DNA. So, that's stuff that is very uncommon in the general population that's popping up more frequently in autism, that happens to have been inherited from Neanderthals. I know people hear "Neanderthal DNA" and just run with it. But that's definitely not what we're saying.

Regarding eugenics though, from a genetics standpoint there's no way this knowledge could be used to abort autistic fetuses, because these genetic factors are only minor effect variants-- which means that there's going to be a bunch of non-autistic people who also have them. We actually didn't find a difference between autistics and their non-autistic family members. They're not reliable enough markers to be misused for something like that (thankfully).

If anything, we're working towards a patent that may help identify potential risk factors for stuff like associated seizures. Some of these variants seem to be playing big roles in seizure susceptibility, so genotyping may be useful for families that can give them a headsup that their kiddo could be at much higher risk for developing epilepsy. That would allow them to be more proactive and monitor seizure propensity more carefully. That's important because death as a result of seizures is still a leading cause of child death in autism, whether it's because they go into status epilepticus or they get a head injury with drop seizures (in which they literally suddenly drop and can injure themselves).

Sapolsky's take on nanderthal genes and autism. It starts at 16:56, after some introduction into neanderthal, denisovan and sapiens mating practices: