The Neanderthal theory makes me think I am not autistic!

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Link to theory if you are unaware: http://rdos.net/eng/asperger.htm

-I am really bad at communicating with dogs, in fact, I am worse than a person who has never seen a dog in the life would be!

-Meat makes me feel sick and makes me more autistic I think

-I don't have red and there is no red hair in my family at all

-I have no food intolerances (except to meat)

-I'm not left-handed

-I was born in the winter

-I don't have face blindness

-I have no problem with eye contact

-I DID NOT have an abnormal head growth, it was COMPLETELY normal, was normal at birth and my head size is still normal

I am not going to list them all but there was also other things in the article that didn't apply to me, the ones listed above are just the big ones. The biggest similarity I can find is the fact that I have brown eyes.

Does this mean I can't have autism?

No, it doesn't mean you can't be autistic.

The Neanderthal theory makes me think that some scientists have too much time on their hands (and possibly too many recreational chemicals in their systems). Our gene pool's so thoroughly mixed since Neanderthals that if you have Neanderthal genes, so does every NT out there.

With your line of reasoning, everyone should have the same eye colour, hair colour, earlobes, et cetera.

I wouldn't worry about Neanderthal theory. It's way too narrow in scope and ignores countless variables. It's just scientists trying to make names for themselves, brainwashing people in the process.

Don't lose any sleep over it.

It means that the neanderthal theory is bunch of hooey!

As a freshman in college back in the seventies I came up with my own theory that White people (like myself) got that way from the neanderthals. The the prevailing notion that the neanderthals somehow evolved into us- all modern people. I concluded from wide reading that that was wrong. Anatomical moderns lived in Western Asia before invading europe and were blocked from western europe by a band of glaciers and areas of bad hunting in central europe- and then during slight let up in the cold climate of the Ice Age the barrier fell and the moderns invaded and swamped the neanderthals. Through a combination of out competing and geneticially swamping the neanderthals ( with or without help from violence) the neanderthals went extinct. But there was some hanky panky between the two groups. So modern europeans have modern bone structure but have the wierd lite eyes skin and hair of the neanderthals.

The rest of the world seems to have caught up to my theory about skin color. Ironically ive kinda abandoned it. The moderns took to wearing cloths early on and probably lost the need for skin pigment to protect from the sun soon after leaving africa.

We know the Neanderthals were light enough in skin color to use dark body paint. But both groups may have evolved light skin indenpendently. Ive become agnostic about the coloration issue.

But even if we did get lite coloration from Neanderthals I doubt we got autism from them. Im not convinced that autism is really anymore correlated to geographic origin than is tooth decay.

And if it is - I dont see it beng correltated to one time neanderthal areas (even as well as light hair eyes and skin seem to be). Alot more works to be done to map autism to even begin looking at the theory seriously. They find autistics on every continent.

So if I were the OP I wouldnt take the theory seriously.

Another thing, I understand dog behavior better than I understand human and I haven't any occipital bun on the back of my head. In fact, my head is a little flatter than average, but not that flat. Just a little. Enough to bug me but not enough to look flat headed.

According to Neanderthal theory, I should have that bump and be able to communicate well with dogs. Since early childhood, I have been able to communicate well with dogs of all kinds, even ones with the lumps atop their heads.

There are a lot of things there that I don't have either. Except for the food intolerance, but loads of people don't like certain foods. And I can eat meat but loads of people eat meat. Oh, and I was born in spring, if that's supposed to make any difference.

The red hair this is true, but many autistics don't have it.

You can still have the gene in your family, even if no living members have red hair (we have about 4 in my family but I'm not a redhead).

I think the red meat thing is a bit of a stretch. If this theory were true at all, it doesn't mean an autistic HOMO SAPIEN is going to be just like a Neanderthal. You are all still definitely H.Sapien with s TINY hit on Neanderthal dna if this is even true.

None of those things mean you can't be autistic, but if you feel that you have no ASD traits at all, maybe though, you actually do have OCD that was misdiagnosed?

They apply the theory to ADHD and OCD too, asfaik.

My dad has red hair but I never inherited it. Well, it's actually gone brown now, but when he was a child he was a redhead.

Those are much more superficial things than the difference between species, though. The human race has been through genetic bottlenecks since we branched off from the neanderthals--some theories put the entire population as low as two thousand individuals, total. (I think 2,000 is a little low; 70,000 is probably a better number--but the point is that the human population has been very small since the Neanderthals were around.) We're basically all descended from that small group of people; and since then there's been so much interbreeding that you simply can't say that "Neanderthal genes" make autism. If we have Neanderthal genes, then the whole human race has them, scattered around, integrated quite fully into the human genome. In other words, if they were Neanderthal genes to begin with, they're human genes now--just like the genes we inherited from amphibians or rodent-like early mammals. You might as well say that another genetic disorder is due to "lizard genes" or yet another is due to "mouse genes". It makes about as much sense as saying Neanderthal genes.

Food intolerance doesn't mean "don't like certain foods." It means that your body cannot process the food properly. People who are lactose intolerant lack an amino acid necessary to process milk, for example, and drinking it can make them sick.

I'm not pointing this out as any support for the neanderthal theory, but rather that variations on "lots of people do that" is often wrong.

My body doesn't physically react to anything. I get diarrhoea when I eat sugar free mints, but it says on the packet that eating too many can cause laxative issues, so I now avoid eating those all together. Otherwise, nothing else reacts. I know a lot of people who are allergic to nuts, by the way.

If face blindness is caused by a gene causing one's brain to recognize neanderthal faces, then why can't autistic people with this symptom easily recall the face of people who have the facial structure of neanderthals?

Just one of many holes in this theory.

Good one.

I don't think so, most people in family that have traits that people with red hair often have (light eyes, fair skin, freckles, etc.). Only one family member has freckles, blue eyes and fairer skin, but he has dark hair. The only family member with lighter hair is my dad and it isn't even that light! It's kind of dirty blonde-light brown colour. I don't know much about my Mom's side, but from what I know, there is an smaller chance of someone in that family having red hair than in my dad's family.