My first love will always be archaeology and the study of what makes us human.This article is speculation. This is my personal musing on the development of certain psychological and physiological human traits. This is not to be taken as anything but my personal opinion. I have no evidence that there was an Asperger’s man. This article was also written several years ago and since then more evidence for the possibility of interbreeding with other hominids has come to light in Russia and in Africa that may support my original idea.
The current model of Homo sapiens evolution is that all modern humans evolved in Africa and spread out from there displacing, destroying, or even out competing all those other hominids they encountered. Multiregional theory has been set aside because it postulated that Homo sapiens evolved in more than one place and there were regional variations. We now know that in at least one case that of the Neanderthal that there was an evolutionary event that created what has been considered a separate species of Human but one capable of interbreeding successfully with Homo sapiens sapien.
So we now know that 3-4% of our genome at least in Asian and European populations contains Neanderthal DNA. This means that Homo sapiens were able to breed with Neanderthals and produce viable offspring. Which means that Neanderthals are most likely regionally evolved Homo sapiens adapted to their unique environment. This would seem to bode well for a reexamination of multiregional theory.
What if there are other regional human variants that have bone structure so similar to Homo sapiens that they are classified as such, but they have evolved to exist in a different environment?
Imagine that a group of Homo Sapiens evolved separately from other Homo sapiens groups possibly somewhere in the mountains of Central Asia. Neanderthal developed to hunt game in open areas in large family groups growing large bone structures and musculature, while this unknown species evolved in a more rugged forest or mountainous environment. Instead of evolving cooperative hunting and social structures like early modern humans, this unknown species developed a different more isolated way of dealing with the environment and unique ways of thinking. This unknown group is less social because they don’t hunt large herd animals cooperatively like both early modern humans and Neanderthal. Instead they hunt in rugged mountains or deep forests adopting a more singular hunting experience with one or maybe two hunters leaving for days or weeks at a time.
This group of hominids develop heightened senses. They are more sensitive to light because they hunt diurnally at dusk and dawn. Their others senses become heightened as well to make them more aware of danger. This is a dangerous time and while other hominids hunt in large groups our hypothetical people work alone. Their sense of smell and taste are stronger so they become somewhat picky eaters. Their sense of touch becomes more acute and along with that they would seem to have less tolerance to pain. While they are more sensitive to touch they are often more tolerant to temperature variations because they have evolved to live in smaller groups or alone and don’t have group body heat to fall back on. These heightened senses have a trade off. These people are less agile than their homo sapiens cousins because the brain and ear are working overtime on the other senses so these people may seems clumsier.
They are likely to sleep less soundly because they don’t have a large group to protect them. This group would experience more sleeping disorders as a result. Because they are less social they don’t develop as much social interplay or social understanding. They don’t require the ability to read the facial language used by other hominids when hunting in groups. They hunt in dense forests or mountains so this silent facial language would have no meaning to them. They have emotions but have no real evolutionary need to express these emotions because most of their time is spend outside of the main group or in very small groupings.
These people are also more intelligent on average than either Neanderthal or the other Homo sapiens branch. The are individual hunters so they can’t rely on the group dynamic to solve problems. This intelligence allows them to subsist in areas not suited to hunting large animals in groups. They become intensely focused on the task at hand and block out almost anything else. This would prove very useful when stalking prey animals and we see this behavior in many large cats. Their heightened senses have another advantage, they are much better at seeing patterns in their environment. They can discern the smallest detail that may be out of place this would make them excellent trackers, again an adaptation to hunting smaller game animals in a rugged environment.
Could this unknown race of man exist? Is there any evidence for him? Is he hidden somewhere in our genome? Yes, I would suggest that people with Aspergers fit this description. While there are some disabling factors in Aspergers most of those are stress related (fits of anger, depression, facial and body ticks). These stress related problems are almost entirely due to not fitting in properly in a non-Aspergers world. In an all Aspergers world those would probably not even exist.
What is Aspergers
The current belief is that Aspergers is a subset of Autism- The reasoning is that people with HFA (high functioning Autism) mimic Aspergers in many ways. I disagree and I believe that further study of the genetic component of both Autism and Aspergers will bear that the two are separate “disorders”.
Aspergers has a list of traits associated with it including
1. inability to “read” the emotions of other people through facial expression (this can be learned)This has often been mistaken for inability to show empathy.
2. Higher sensory sensitivity (light, taste, touch, hearing etc)
3. Lower sensitivity to temperature extremes
5. Intelligence level is always from normal to advanced (basically lower intelligent individuals do not fit into the criteria
6. ability to focus intensely on subjects (these are generally considered to be subjects of interest to the individual)
I’ll quote from wiki on the sensory aspect.
“Individuals with AS often have excellent auditory and visual perception. Children with ASD often demonstrate enhanced perception of small changes in patterns such as arrangements of objects or well-known images; typically this is domain-specific and involves processing of fine-grained features”
If these are evolutionary traits then they fit well a hunter who spends much of his time focusing on prey in a very diverse environment. These hunters would by necessity and prey scarcity hunt and live in smaller groups and focus more on elusive smaller prey animals.
Yes this is all conjecture at this point, but all knowledge starts from someone asking a question. I am asking could there be an evolutionary component to Aspergers?