John - I don't rule out those other factors even while I reckon that the change of dental amalgam has been the main cause of increase. Also the time-series data is not sufficiently clear to rule out a possibility of still thousands of cases of autism being mainly due to vaccines. Just I don't find it sufficiently clear to confirm either way.
Also I am beginning to suspect some new factor has been involved in more recent increases, possibly the diagnoses catching up with reality, or effects of mobile phones liberating mercury from dental amalgam.

Since were on Autistic art, just a plug for Polly`s Place where our artistic autistic s and family members can turn a coin or two thanks to generous kind buyers and the hard work of Polly and her team.

https://www.theautismtrust.org.uk/pages/meet-all-our-talented-artsits

Pharma For Prison

MMR RIP

Grace

Yes, I agree, and very well put about Frith and her "islets". The only real disagreement I have with Robin is there is such an environmental toxic brew now that one cannot put it down to one thing, and the many people who have seen vaccine damage have seen vaccine damage, some of which may also have been in part precipitated by parental dental amalgams, but we also have Round-Up, WiFi and common use of SSRIs etc all of which you expect to extract a toll on us and our children.

As Autism goes mainstream the psychology field and pop culture is becoming part of this scam.

An autism diagnosis will change your life for the better.
All you can do is therapy and lots of it.
Self-acceptance an loving yourself (They are not ill)
Coping (Painting. animal therapy, whatever but never any real medical treatment)
Autism pride
TV series (The good doctor, Big bang theory)

All of this leads to passivity and dumbing down of society. They should call it state sanctioned artificial large scale brain damage instead.

One other point needs making about this propaganda piece: By saying "autism existed 10,000's of years ago", they deny that anything recent, like, oh, VAXXES might be causing it....
Think about that!
*********

I'm pretty sure that what was the whole point of the article.

They can't use real science to deny the autism-vaccine connection, it doesn't exist. Heck they can't even use real science to prove that any vaccine, has ever prevented a disease of any kind.

They produce this kind of nonsense all the time, it just takes difference forms. Just go back to that study in 2011, where a research team (.. partially funded by Autism Speaks!) just happened to be dispatched to South Korea. Where they just happened to stumble upon a high incidence of autism. That just happened to be even worse, than what WE were experiencing in the most vaccinated population on earth.

The immediate implication, using actual wording from that study, is

"... This study is further evidence that autism transcends cultural, geographic, and ethnic boundaries and that autism is a major global public health concern, not limited to the Western world..."

Same old same old, as they just deny, deny, deny ...... that vaccines could possibly be implicated in this horrific tragedy.

One other point needs making about this propaganda piece: By saying "autism existed 10,000's of years ago", they deny that anything recent, like, oh, VAXXES might be causing it....
Think about that!

Here is a different historical perspective, from myself admittedly so it obviously counts for nothing.

Life in the past was very taxing. No-one could just turn on their central heating to keep warm. They couldn't just toddle over to Tesco/Walmart to get food. They couldn't even use an umbrella to keep dry. They didn't have much means to defend against wild animals. They had to work hard to store tons of food for over the winter.
They certainly couldn't afford to be autistic, or depressed, or missing too many marbles. Natural selection must have kept various mental problems to a very low level.

We hear of many hardships of living in the Middle Ages, the time of the Black Death and so on. We don't hear about mental problems of those dark times.

Then - something started happening a few centuries ago. A great book "The invisible plague" by E Fuller Torrey documents it. Gradually mental problems increased in the increasingly techno world. "Bedlam" in London for instance, where the VERY RARE mental cases were exhibited as if in a zoo.

Let's jump forward at this point to a more recent researcher by the name of (quick check of what it says on my NHS (National Hypocrisy System) card...) Robin P Clarke.

I was doing brilliantly at grammar school until about age 15, when I "~MYSTERIOUSLY~" started to develop all sorts of horrendous mental/physical problems. None of the (cough) experts ever had any suggestions of what may have caused this or what could be done. I carried on under this mysterious curse. And carried on and on. I thought maybe one day I would learn something.

Meanwhile, while I was unable to do things like wake up and attend courses, or pass exams, and could hardly even write, I did get to have published a number of scientific papers. The first was the still-unchallenged "antiinnatia" theory - of autism, IQ, and genius. If you can't afford €l$evi€r's $70 fee you can read it for FREE at Chapter 7 at www.pseudoexpertise.com. Saint B Rimland described it as "excellent" "fine work", so so much for his judgement, pah. And the (then) most-cited-ever scientist HJ Eysenck foolishly said it was "well-worth publishing", only one of two theories published in his journal. But Saint Lorna Wing forgot to mention it in her literature reviews.

Numerous years later, the internet developed and I got a vague hint from some forgotten website(s) that the "mysterious" cause of my ruinous (non-autistic) disabilities could be mercury vapor from dental amalgams. I then started researching that subject. I found out several things that very few people know. Even Prof Haley didn't know a key fact! Anyway, it is all explained in FREE Chapter 3 at www.pseudoexpertise.com, and I won't copy it all out here as I'm concerned this page may run out of ink.

I first discovered (in the context of my PREVIOUSLY-published theory) that the increase of autism could be fully understood in terms of the change to non-gamma-2 amalgams from 1976 onwards. I then checked the case for vaccines causing the autism increase, and I have presented my full review of the question in FREE Chapter 6 at www.pseudoexpertise.com. (If anyone can get some pharma company to mail me a few million bucks, I'd be very grateful as I have not succeeded so far. I consider vaccines to be poisonous pseudoscience by the way.)

This then led me to further predict that the same mercury increase would have caused a concurrent epidemic of adult mercury poisoning such as had destroyed my own life (as by profession I have always been a NOBODY, in contrast to all those experts with strings of letters after their names, see FREE Chapter 1 for more). And my graph 3.5 shows that epidemic prediction confirmed, exactly same time as the autism increase.

This then led me to a further prediction, that the original introduction of amalgam would have caused an earlier whopping increase of disability 120 years before. At which I was fortunate to find Fuller Torrey's book and used his historical data to produce my Figure 3.7 - basically another whopping prediction massively confirmed. (And I could go on....)

Such confirmed predictions are the hallmark of scientific superlativeness. By contrast any number of stellar "qualifications" merely attest to ability to parrot exams and fit in institutionally and not rock any boats of the latest would-be-science fashions.

Where does my mentally incompetent adult son return his "gift?" Perhaps we can exchange it for one of the authors?

The comment section, I agree, does at least show evidence that many are still cognizant of reality, but I think I'm seeing in this articles reams of wanting-by-some-to-be-assimilated-by-all assumptions based on what I think is an attempt to normalize population-wide neurological decline.

"study says?" Did they publish some data like some analyzed petrified gene sequences (containing all those autism genes we've nailed down) found in trace amounts around prehistoric cave drawings?

So if someone can't seem to focus on anything, are they supposed to say to themselves, "Well I guess I've evolved far from the cavemen of old, and clearly, I'm not autistic? Now what did I just sit down to do?"

And if someone can do anything with effective focus, are they supposed to suspect they are autistic and go seek out a diagnosis? Or just tell themselves they must be one of those "really rare" people otherwise?

And anyone autistic or otherwise, focused or not very, when they see autism arising especially in the children around them, they're supposed to think, "Oh cavemen! Well these "genes" ensured our survival so I'm sure they're/we're getting on just fine...?"

Ain't revisionist history grand? It sounds like some Baron Cohen research. Utter garbage.

Hilarious. So all of these prehistoric autistic people procreated? They were able to keep up with the group? Steer clear of danger? Somehow not drown? And then these genes - which are apparently desirable - went dormant for a very long period following the age of great artists, and then have suddenly exploded in the last 20 years? How many of the great artists wore diapers I’m curious?

Arrant nonsense!

This is perhaps the dumbest nonsense ever published.

Human brain sizes reached their peak 500,000 years ago, and have not changed much since.
Except 10,000 years ago the brains shrank a bit. That is according to some good articles, and research and not speculation.

Such as here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-has-human-brain-evolved/

That is about the time; that we changed from hunter-gathers to agriculture, started to eat a lot of grain/wheat. Civilization.

We even have a written record of that transition:
Genesis in the Bible. This old record tells about the mark of Cain on the fore head. It goes on to say that his punishment was that anything he tried to grow, would perish. He was a city dweller, maybe a farmer; but no longer a child of nature, and did not understand it. Perhaps some kind of innate understanding was lost?

Which caused the rise of doctors that thought miracles of health were found in the minerals of earth, and invented ways to get those minerals of the earth inside the human body other than the two natural existing openings the human body had.

What's truly frightening about this is that it's good old-fashioned scientific racism, straight out of the Nazi handbook. The Nazis argued that "Nordics" had superior brains because they had to struggle for survival in the frozen north, and hence evolved greater intelligence and creativity. Africans had it easy living in warmer southern climes, so supposedly they never developed art. So if you're not autistic and not of Northern European origins, you probably can't draw. Substitute "Aryan" for "autistic" in this article, and it reads just like a Nazi racial screed. Not coincidentally, Hans Asperger, celebrated in "NeuroTribes", was an active Nazi collaborator, which Steve Silberman somehow overlooked.

From the article:

"Medical researcher, Barry Wright and archaeologist Penny Spikins, both of the University of York, carried out research on students at the university and found that 4 per cent were on the autistic spectrum. Most had never realised their autistic status and that they owed some of their abilities and skills to the condition. Significantly, the highest levels of hereditary autism are found in populations of Northern European origin, many of whose ancestors would have experienced the challenges of the Ice Age....'Detail focus is what determines whether you can draw realistically; you need it in order to be a talented realistic artist. This trait is found very commonly in people with autism and rarely occurs in people without it,' [Spikins] added."

So "detail focus" is how we're diagnosing autism now?

I recently heard about "white people perfectionism." It was presented as a bad thing, but it sort of sounded, well...really, really good. Of all the faults one might have, that's the one I'd pick. This article is along those lines. It aims to soften up its audience by appealing to human vanity. Once the mind is softened up, it's more willing to swallow the bilge: hereditary autism and who has it, detail focus and who has it.

As for the cave art, artistic, yeah; detailed, not so much.

This foolish hypothesis was significantly first floated in the Cambridge Journal of Archaeology in 1998, Nicholas Humphreys, ‘Cave art, autism and the evolution of the human mind’ - completely unscientific, untestable, whimsical. Perhaps in some ways 2018 is another 1998. Any kind of nonsense to distract from the unfolding carnage.

A fetid, heaping mass of drivel. Not even good as fiction, which it clearly is.

Whoudda thunk it .. "Much of the world’s earliest great art is likely to have been created by gifted early humans on the autism spectrum, new research by British scientists suggests."

Odd that Darwin's Origin of the Species made no mention of "gifted early humans on the autism spectrum"? I suppose we can't hold Darwin responsible for not being as proficient in "identifying autistic behaviors" and their contribution to the evolution of mankind .. as only in recent years have we learned that autism has gone unrecognized for centuries.

Thanks to British scientists we now know how critical AUTISM was to the evolution of mankind.