ASD in the Stone Age

By Fiona Candland

Social perceptions towards individuals with intellectual disabilities, specifically within autism spectrum disorder (ASD), have changed drastically over time, fostering a range of sentiments between philosophical eras, societies, and religions. Today, people with characteristics associated with ASD receive mixed responses, some praised for their individuality and others shamed for their differences. To understand the role society may be playing in the othering of people with ASD, it is fruitful to look back on societies that had positive relationships with such characteristics. The hunter-gatherer societies from the Stone Age, beginning about 100,000 years ago and beyond, valued ASD behaviors as individuals possessing such traits were an asset to group survival [1]. 

ASD is characterized by three prominent features: social deficits, indicating difficulty in maintaining and creating emotional relationships, verbal and nonverbal communication, and the necessity for repetitive behavior. Many other characteristics color ASD, such as an obsession with systems [2], and others that are shared with ADHD. Such traits include attention to small details, the ability to detect slight changes in one’s environment, and attention deficits [3]. By today’s standards, these traits are seen as inhibitions to things like siing and focusing in a classroom or being productive in a corporate seing for eight hours straight, five days a week. However, the necessity for these almost robotic abilities was not always a pillar of success and value in society. Things like paern recognition, need for routine, desire for systems, and the ability to detect minute changes in environments were greatly valued in the Stone Age, essential, even, for the progression towards modern society.  In the Stone Age, otherwise known as the Palaeolithic Era, food was sourced by hunting various animals and harvesting a range of plants, seeds, nuts, and berries [4]. To fulfill their nutritional needs, it was essential that tribes be in tune with their environment, from the weather trends to the routines of the animals, and the cycles of the crops they harvested. Paying attention to nature’s patterns quite literally kept tribes alive. For example, recognizing that one berry of a certain size and shade made a tribe member sick and another berry of a different size, but the same shade also made a tribe member sick was incredibly useful information that many neurotypical people would not have observed. Additionally, understanding the routines of animals of prey was crucial to survival, as the majority of the early humans’ diet was meat-based [5]. Connecting behavioral trends to different species, like nocturnal vs. diurnal, and understanding their habits to predict when they would be most susceptible was critical in feeding the entire tribe. People with ASD in the Stone Age were celebrated for their ability to follow patterns and make meaning out of trends. 

Another way people with ASD used pattern recognition to improve and help society was by creating systems to explain the natural world. As mentioned earlier, another ASD characteristic is an obsession with systems, which are formed through a comprehension of paerns. As Crespi, an evolutionary biologist, explains, “The recognition of repeating paerns in stimuli has also been proposed as a primary basis for forms of talent and savantism in autism, such as calendar calculating, mathematics and other specialized skills” [6]. The unique ability to quickly recognize patterns and create greater systems that tracked such paerns was essential to the survival of early Homo sapiens. Spikins highlights a few archaeological artefacts found at European Upper Palaeolithic sites to illustrate the creation of these early systems and connects them to ASD traits: “a unique focus on recording and understanding natural systems, particularly astronomical systems, which parallels with that seen in those with aspergers syndrome today” [7]. One artefact she points to to embellish her point is a Taï plaque, dated to around 10,000 years ago. The plaque is decorated with many notches, interpreted to be one of the first calendars (Figure 1). 

Figure 1 The Taï plaque (Marshack 1991: figure 1, p26.[8])

An obsession with and the ability to create systems was crucial for early humans in planning for, understanding, and surviving in the world around them. To this day, we rely on calendars and use astronomical systems created by people with autism to function in society. The sophistication of such systems and the creativity and intelligence necessary for their creation prove that ASD traits pushed human innovation and society. 

Pattern recognition also helped societies detect predators and ominous trends in the environment. One other ASD trait connected to this theme of paerns is the ability to detect minute changes in one’s environment, complemented by a thorough aention to detail. To observe when something is abnormal, one must already understand the routines and paerns that were in place before the unusual activity. This attention to one’s environment is categorized by both speed and accuracy. In a psychological study, psychologists found that “In that condition [the harder detection conditions], the group with autism was significantly faster than the control group and showed less of an increase in RT [response time] with increasing display size than the control group” [9]. This study consisted of many tests where people with and without autism had to detect different features in increasingly chaotic environments; as the quotation remarks, the people with autism performed at a much higher standard. To protect one’s tribe from poison, illness, predators, and other potentially deadly features of the environment, the tribe had to notice changes in their seing. For instance, having the ability to notice when more of a specific fruit has been picked, indicating a predator of similar physical ability and intelligence, or to distinguish a harmless animal’s tracks from an aggressive, territorial one of similar appearance. These observations were influential in determining whether a tribe succeeded or went extinct. 

While people with ASD are usually celebrated for their intelligence, they are commonly othered due to their differences in communication and the formation of emotional bonds. While their ability to detect patterns, perhaps keeping a tribe safe from poisonous berries, and creating systems like calendars, may seem more straightforward in arguing their importance in hunter-gatherer societies, their differences in human interactions also beered societies. A common condemnation of autistic people regarding their relationships with others is a lack of empathy [10]. Empathy is a daunting term to pin down, however, it may not be empathy as a whole that people with ASD struggle with, rather, a lack of identifying emotions in others. Autistic people are, however, very focused on fairness and equality, driven to uphold justice despite emotional tumult. In parallel with the highlighted systems individuals with ASD created, they also used these systems to facilitate fairness within tribes. Spikins points to a case study of the Inuit tribe in northern Canada who use a system called niqaiturasuaktut, which was highly influenced by rules and fairness. The system is (it is unclear if niqaiturasuaktut is still in use today) a hierarchy based on need when deciding who gets to eat what part of the animals and how much during winter seal hunts [11]. This lack of ‘standard’ emotional intelligence allowed people to create fair rules despite any emotional preferences, displaying how a trait that is perceived as negative in modern society actually furthered it, and may be a reason that the Inuit tribe remains today.

The Stone Age is the earliest period historians have identified ASD traits present in humans [12], and their contributions to society since then have been present in every era–even today’s. Through exploring multiple traits that today’s society deems a weakness and how those aributes pushed Stone Age societies to progress, it is clear that these ‘weaknesses’ are a product of the society that has declared them so. Instead of othering individuals with differences in how they form relationships, perceive environments, and exist in society, perhaps we should reflect on the society that grants value and revokes it. People with ASD have been celebrated in past time periods, the Stone Age is just one example. Instead of othering specific groups of people, it's time to recognize that we, modern society, may be the real outsiders. 

Sources

[1] Wal, Mii. "Autism before and after the Enlightenment." In Autism: A Social and Medical History, pp. 11-28. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2023. page 12

[2] Baron-Cohen, A. The hyper-systemising assortative mating theory of autism, Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry 2006; 30 (5) 865–872.

[3] O'riordan, Michelle A., Kate C. Plaisted, Jon Driver, and Simon Baron-Cohen. "Superior visual search in autism." Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 27, no. 3 (2001): 719. 

[4] 

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[5] Cordain L, Brand-Miller J, Eaton SB, et al. Plant-animal subsistence ratios and macronutrient energy estimations in worldwide hunter-gatherers. Am J Clin Nutr 2000;71:682–92. 

[6] Crespi, Bernard. "Paern unifies autism." Frontiers in Psychiatry 12 (2021): 621659.

[7] Spikins, Penny. "The stone age origins of autism." Recent Advances in Autism Spectrum Disorders-Volume II (2013): 113.

[8] Marshack A. The Taï plaque and calendrical notation in the upper Palaeolithic, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 1991; 1 (1) 2. 

[9] O'riordan, Michelle A., Kate C. Plaisted, Jon Driver, and Simon Baron-Cohen. "Superior visual search in autism." Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 27, no. 3 (2001): 719. 

[10] Fletcher-Watson, Sue, and Geoffrey Bird. "Autism and empathy: What are the real links?." Autism 24, no. 1 (2020): 3-6. Page 3 

[11] Spikins, Penny. "The stone age origins of autism." Recent Advances in Autism Spectrum Disorders-Volume II (2013): 113. 

[12] 

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