Neanderthal DNA has been implicated in autism

Post Reply New Topic

Hi, everyone. I promised I'd be back!

My team and I just published a paper today in Nature: Molecular Psychiatry reporting on the discovery that a subset of Neanderthal DNA appears to be playing a role in autism. We studied black non-Hispanic, white Hispanic, and white non-Hispanic autistics and the trend was the same across all these groups compared to ethnically-matched non-autistics/allistics.

Before you ask, just in case any of you don't know me from Adam (which is probably most of you nowadays), I'm #ActuallyAutistic and have been a long time member of WP, including under a different handle (Sophist) in the metaphorical "ancient times" aka 2004-ish. I was also a mod on here for awhile.

Original Article:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-024-02593-7

Lay-friendly blog:
https://go.nature.com/3WrWJxg

Let me know if you all have any questions!

~Sophist/flibbit/Emily...

WOAH!! That is so freaking cool!! I am reading your paper right now! I feel a little bit dumb with some of these big technical words/phrases, but I'm getting the gist of what you all are writing about. The abstract, background, and conclusion paragraphs are making the most sense to me hehe.

I like reading about this because I have a very small amount of Neanderthal DNA and I'm also autistic. I suspect my father (who also has Neanderthal DNA) also has autism.

Thanks for sharing your paper! Wonderfully done (though my unprofessional opinion probably doesn't matter!) ʕ•ᴥ<ʔ!

Its been speculated about for some years now...that autism could be legacy of hybridization with Neanderthals back in the stone age. Maybe there is some truth to it.

Glad you like it!



Yep, rdos was the first to propose the idea. I remember it from back when. I've linked one of his papers in the Discussion section of the paper.

Oh, good grief!

What has NOT been implicated in causing autism?

Seriously, it seems that every week someone is trying to become famous for announcing that they alone know what causes autism.  NO ONE KNOWS what causes autism, and these "announcements" do nothing to make life better for people with autism.

Last edited by Fnord on 17 May 2024, 11:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Who, or what, is "rdos"?

Ive actually run across that word before in connection with anthropology.

the Swedish dude: https://www.rdos.net/eng/

This is not "the" cause of autism. I work in genetics. There is no single cause; it's insanely complicated and often multifactorial. But this is a subset of susceptibility factors that are playing a role in a wide range of folks' autism, which we happened to have inherited from hybridization from Neanderthals. They're weak susceptibility factors, which means alone they're not going to be the sole cause, but they're widespread. So, this is part of the larger story.

PS: Just because the internet provides a certain sense of anonymity doesn't give you the right to be rude. You can provide a critique without also getting personal.

Yes. An independent researcher. Non scientist. Though he seems well informed.

That red haired Neanderthal picture made quite a splash on WP some years ago.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 18 May 2024, 8:46 am, edited 1 time in total.

Correlation does not imply causation.

Not impossible.

But hard to prove. Or to disprove.

Autism is probably mostly genetic.

But its not like hemophelia, or sickle cell anemia. A descrete simple condition caused by one, or a few, genes, that can be easily tracked back to ancestors.

Sickle cell, for example, is easily traceable to having had ancestors who lived in areas plagued by Malaria in centuries past. A single gene, unexpressed gene, protected you from malaria, but the double dose killed you with sickle cell, so natural selection favored the greater number of folks protected by the former...and f****d over the smaller number who have the later.

Autism MIGHT be a legacy of interbreeding with Neanderthals. But it would much more complicated to prove.

"Autistics dont necessarily have more Neanderthal genes than non autistics" they just have more of certain key genes related to brain formation. IS the gist of it.

But even so ...subsaharan Africans should have less incidence of autism than does the rest of the world. At present it would be hard to prove that because (a)subsaharan African countries dont have much healthcare for autistics, and (b) subsaharan ancestry people in the Americas tend to have less healthcare than do Whites. So you have a lot variables to plow through.

With the rise of the far right globally, I would prefer you didn't research this, regardless of
what truth there may be.

They will label us as "cavemen" and have as removed from the gene pool.

If you do continue, brand it differently, just refer to genetic sequences and don't say Neanderthal.

Can you explain why some Aboriginals, Asians, Native Americans, First Nations, and Sub-Saharan Africans with no measurable Neanderthal DNA have autism?

Either Neanderthal DNA is not as an important factor as you might think, or the study itself was achingly Leucocentric in its focus.  Science is not all about being white.

Learn to read.
She already said "there is no one cause of autism".

Second:

learn to read a map: all non African populations have measurable Neanderthal DNA, and south Asians and Oceanians have a lot of Denisovian as well. Asians, Australian Aboriginonies, and American Indians, are all "non Africans".

However...

Though some DNA from the north (ie Eurasia) drifted down to subsaharan Africa in the last 20 thousand years if it were shown that subsaharan Africans have the same rates of autism as do Europeans, and Asians, Amerinds, etc then that would be a problem for the hypothesis.

Great, now people are going to think we're a bunch of stereotypical smelly, primitive, antisocial ape-men who speak in grunts as we drag our knuckles on the ground. Which really isn't accurate to Neanderthal people. Except the smelly part, as all humans are smelly.

Hey!

My knuckles don't drag!

Not right now, anyway.