Historical Background
Among the many questions that surround autism, one likely never to get a solid, uncontroverted answer is the following:
How far back in human history does autism go?
It is obvious that at some stage in our species’ development, some person was first to display the behaviors we today call “autistic.” To date, however, we have no way to identify when or where that happened on the timeline of human evolution. There are no direct fossils for behavior. Despite that, it seems reasonable and intuitive to assume that the autism’s defining behaviors, relative to our own time, are nothing new – and that a thousand years ago, there were people acting in ways which, if they were observed today, would prompt a modern-day diagnosis of autistic spectrum disorder (ASD).
That such individuals were not diagnosed during their own lifetimes, over most of those ten centuries, owes to a simple fact that autism, as a diagnostic concept, achieved recognition only remarkably recently,...
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Donvan, J., Zucker, C. (2020). History of Autism as a Diagnostic Concept. In: Volkmar, F.R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Autism Spectrum Disorders. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6435-8_102177-1
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