Editing Openai/69177fbb-14c4-800f-bc57-ccb5a1d88c95 (section)

=== The Neanderthal–Homo sapiens selection pattern wasn’t driven by “autistic-like traits” being bad. ===
It was driven by:

===== Hybrids inherited combinations of genes that didn’t work well together, especially in: =====
* brain development
* testes
* skeletal morphology
* immune regulation

Natural selection aggressively removes variants that impair hybrid function, even if they were neutral or beneficial in their original population.

===== Neanderthal brain-development genes were tuned to Neanderthal skull shape, growth timing, and developmental trajectory. Introduced into sapiens architecture, they broke things. =====

This is like taking engine parts from one machine and plugging them into a different model—most won’t fit cleanly.

===== They may have worked perfectly well in Neanderthal populations. =====
The purging reflects hybrid incompatibility, not that Neanderthals had “bad cognitive traits.”

So the mechanism is not “autistic cognition is bad and Neanderthal cognition is like autism so it was removed.”
It’s gene mismatch, not trait content.