Autism Advantages in Humans' Hunter-Gatherer Past

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I reckon the Hunter/Farmer argument is probably not far from the money!

I grew up in an area with Hunter/Farmers and they seemed like some of the most genuinely content people that I have ever met. The closest I got was planting in the yard and mowing the grass, but it made me happier than any money I ever came across.

They still do it, still have their small family run stores, and live in communities where the people know each other well and can depend on each other at times; time still stands still in pockets here and there throughout the country.

Once you get used to going fast, it's hard to back to slow, though.

I had read in many places that Yanomamo headmen have relatively few power and most important decisions are taken by some kind of consensus of the adult males of the village. Yes, I admit that defining "egalitarianism" as "equality between adult males" is erroneous (but this is the kind of "equality" in almost all societies that anthropologists call "egalitarian"), but I think that you are falling in the opposite extreme - measuring the degree of equality in a society only by the equality between genders.



Why this is a "curious position"?

Ok as a solitary hunter. Think in terms of what was available and how things were. A single person has much lower food requirements that a group. In situations where food is scarce (for very long periods, hundreds or thousands of years) evolution would favour solitary hunting. Territories would develop. overlap would probably occur. People would need to meet (for mating at least). Now human babies are rather helpless so I could see that pairing might occur, if just to ensure the survival of offspring. With a lack of resources young would be forced away at around adolescence, there just wouldn't be enough food.

Living like this well, wanting to be with lots of other people would really hurt your chances for survival. So those that could focus on living were better able to survive. Hyper-sensitivity so sounds or lights, focused towards danger sense would help keep one prepared for attacks by other humans or other predatory animals. Having a strong ability to remember, from childhood, what foods are edible and how to eat them would definitely be a strong point. Remember Aspie facts remembering is somewhat environment related, if you never saw Lego or star maps in your life you couldn't really get an obsession over them. If the only thing you have to remember is how to survive though, remembering facts is really important and really helpful.

Thing is if resources aren't so hard to come by, groups are far, far better. Grazing animals often herd together no? So say in like an ice age, solo hunting to survive would have been really helpful, and happen over a very long period, so evolution started kicking in. Then the ice age ends and community living (ie tribes) would be better. A group can hold a much more resource rich territory than an individual could, groups allow those that get sick or injured the ability to recover without having to hunt. However the Aspie traits could be helpful to some degree, again that person that remembers every single medicinal herb, how to use it and where and when they grow would be invaluable to a tribal community. Thus there is only a weak evolutionary pressure for the genes responsible to disappear.

At the very least, humans did in fact evolve ( according to some people ) and as such it makes sense for evolution to at least be a possible factor for many, if not all, aspects of humanity.

I know this all speculation but I still find it very interesting. another interesting question:

Why do we seem to "store fear memories in an exaggerated and more persistent manner, generalize learned fear more easily to similar stimuli and once fear to a particular stimulus configuration is acquired it is difficult to erase." ?

Perhaps a related link to this, but early in the stages of investigation:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2834845/

I think the article may be on the right track, but not quite there - it's not really correct to think of auties as having no social skills. Our social problems primarily have to do with interactions with neurotypicals; small groups of auties/aspies can actually work quite well together.

I think perhaps a more likely way to view the situation is with something like an aspie level of autism as the original type. We wouldn't have done well in large groups, or cooperating extensively with strangers, but we wouldn't have had to; the population density wasn't high enough to require it. We would have worked well in small groups of closely related individuals.

In this view, it was neurotypicality that was the "new" personality type. As population densities increased, spending less brain space on hunting skills and more on cooperative skills made more sense, since more of one's interactions were with other people rather than with nature. Neurotypical populations would have had a great advantage over aspie populations in warfare, since neurotypical style group think would have made it possible to coordinate much larger combat forces. Eventually, the neurotypical type would have become the predominant type.

That's an excellent point. I think that in many ways our modern societies are quite antithetical to human nature. The big benefits of large populations/forced societal large-scale social interactions is the advancement of science/technology. I wonder if this was a necessary evil to "advance" our species or will it be our ultimate downfall?

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/the-brain-2/28-what-happened-to-hominids-who-were-smarter-than-us/article_view?b_start:int=2&-C=

Interesting article on the evolutionary "benefits" of intelligence.

The finding was very controversial and it was later determined that they were not a separate species.

Neanderthals had large cranial capacities but did not have the juvenile facial features of this arachaelogical find. Instead, Neanderthals were extremely masculinized in appearance.

At the time of the discovery many were speculating that Autism was related to the Boskops; the description here runs eerily similiar to Autistic Self Reports, although the author here was not proposing an autistic connection.

If nothing else, it shows there was a great deal of human variation, 10 to 30K years ago, and to be careful not make more out of archaelogical evidence than is actually there

The description runs similar to recent scientific studies on Autism that suggest Autistic people are prisoners of their own brains. The comment on free will is also interesting, in light of recent research on autism.

There was also an article in discover magazine about how Hunter and Gatherer groups had larger cranial capacities, higher aggression, and how agrarian societies domesticated man by weeding out the more aggressive, masculinized individuals, because a violent nature was not a valued trait in this type of society.

Neanderthals were definitely more masculinized by archaelogical record and had large cranial capacity that not only was required for intelligence but also for controlling a much more robust body. I doubt they could afford to be too violent with each other, but it is hard to say how they would have interacted with competing groups. With the high levels of testosterone that Neanderthals had, chances are they would have attempted reproduction with any new group they came into contact with.

I still don't think any research has come up with conclusive evidence of why they disappeared from the fossil record. But what is left is a more domesticated version of humanity.

I thought this recent study in nature has some relevance to this thread:

City living and urban upbringing affect neural social stress processing in humans

More than half of the world’s population now lives in cities, making the creation of a healthy urban environment a major policy priority. Cities have both health risks and benefits, but mental health is negatively affected: mood and anxiety disorders are more prevalent in city dwellers and the incidence of schizophrenia is strongly increased in people born and raised in cities. Although these findings have been widely attributed to the urban social environment, the neural processes that could mediate such associations are unknown. Here we show, using functional magnetic resonance imaging in three independent experiments, that urban upbringing and city living have dissociable impacts on social evaluative stress processing in humans. Current city living was associated with increased amygdala activity, whereas urban upbringing affected the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex, a key region for regulation of amygdala activity, negative affect and stress. These findings were regionally and behaviourally specific, as no other brain structures were affected and no urbanicity effect was seen during control experiments invoking cognitive processing without stress. Our results identify distinct neural mechanisms for an established environmental risk factor, link the urban environment for the first time to social stress processing, suggest that brain regions differ in vulnerability to this risk factor across the lifespan, and indicate that experimental interrogation of epidemiological associations is a promising strategy in social neuroscience.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v4 ... 10190.html

I saw that and found it interesting. Probably is related to why some of us can't stand Superwalmart. I'm glad I was raised in a small town. Our evolutionary roots put us in relatively small groups only a few hundred years ago. Big cities are, a human experiment that continues. Animals don't respond well in overpopulated circumstances, not surprising that humans don't either. Animals respond by lowering reproduction rates and violent conflict in competition for resources. This article gives an indication of what's going on in the back of our brains in overpopulated circumstances. It would be interesting to study the impacts on reproduction.

I moved to a larger city when I was in second grade for one year, First grade was a tiny school and second grade was a large catholic school. I was overwhelmed and glad to get back to my small school, when we moved back to our small town.

It was a topic of interest when I was growing up with TV shows like Green Acres, and the Beverly Hill Billies. Big city dwellers goes to the backwoods and backwoods people go to the big city.

TV stimulates mirror neurons, it must have an impact also, now with big screen virtual reality interaction with thousands of additional humans above and beyond the three dimensional consequences of overpopulation. Not to mention the incredible scenarios on TV that we feed our minds with.

There was a certain point in my life, where it all stopped being stimulating and it started to overstimulate me; I guess a tipping point of sorts. The article talked about effects later in life from being raised in a big city. It points to a cumulative effect and a tipping point for mental health issues.

People that live in small little communities and manage to make a living there are very fortunate in my estimation. Archaeological evidence indicate we lived in very small groups for thousands of years. Overpopulation for primates is an unusual circumstance. But, we no longer have any natural predators to deal with other than ourselves.

Hello all,

I have been reading this topic fairly extensively as I find it interesting. I am a masters psychology student (in London, UK) who is doing psychological research relating to this area of research over the summer period. I am looking to recruit participants who maybe interested in taking part in this research project. The experiment involves viewing two Virtual Environment simulations broadcasted on a Head-Mounted Display (HMD). After viewing the simulations, you will be asked to complete a series of questionnaires where you have the opportunity to describe your experience. At the end of the experiment, you will be paid £5 and receive a full debrief. If you would like to find out more information on this virtual reality project or express an interest in taking part; You can find out more information on the thread titled "Participants urgently required for Virtual Reality study(UK)" which I've posted using this alias.

Thank you,
best wishes,
JD

Last edited by CaptainGrey on 11 Jul 2012, 9:40 am, edited 1 time in total.

If you have sensitive hearing you hear the twig snap behind so you don't get eaten by the saber tooth tiger.Smell and taste sensitivity would help in identifying edible plants and an excellent memory would help you to remember where those foods were.The ability to over focus would be highly beneficial in stalking or waiting for prey.All these are highly tuned survival traits.The heavy sleeper gets eaten,the restless sleeper hears a sound and escapes to pass his genetics on.