The hunter-gatherer neurotribe: gifted, geeks, aspies

and other aliens in this world

Andreas Hofer

Dedicated to my wife Alyona and my children

Abbreviations:
ADHD Attention deficit disorder
ASD Autism spectrum disorder
HG hunter-gatherer (type)
NT neurotypical; NT (analyst group) in MBTI
MBTI Myers-Briggs type indicator
ODD Oppositional defiant disorder

Table of contents
Abbreviations:

Table of contents

Born different and why we are attracted to stories about mutants and parallel worlds

The parallel worlds of sensors and intuitives

Where does mutual attraction come from?

Hunter-gatherers vs farmers

The evolution of personality groups according to subsistence type

Gifted people: hunter-gatherer minds

The giftedness curse

The striking similarities between gifted and autistic children

ADHD, the hunter-gatherer hypothesis and orchid children

The psychology and biology of gifted children and highly intelligent people

Life-history strategy and personality traits

Romantic relationships and reproduction

Neurotypicality, normality and psychopathology

Modern hunter-gathers at the workplace

Social anxiety rising among kids and teenagers

Foundations of an Evolutionary Pedagogy

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the
square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have
no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push
the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones
who do.”

― Rob Siltanen

Born different and why we are attracted to stories about

mutants and parallel worlds

The above text has always struck a chord with me. I never seemed to fit into society: I was a
quiet kid, a very quiet kid, who dreamed most of my school years away, often wondering if I
could ever be successful in this world. I was a sickly child and spent most of my childhood
alone, reading comic books or books. Even as a baby and toddler I was different, I was a
preemie, severely underweight and difficult baby. As my language skills in elementary school
were way beyond the normal age range I was tested for the possibility of skipping a grade,
however, my maths skills were average, so I stayed in my year.

Unless really highly gifted, a lot of gifted children have similar experiences. Gifted children
are often twice-exceptional (i.e. they might have dyslexia, ADHD or ASD) and their
giftedness goes unnoticed, or in the worst case these children might even end up in special
education.

As a parent and teacher, I have first-hand experiences with gifted children. One fact about
them that is little known: gifted children are often “orchid children. They can grow up to be
the founders of Google or not really much in terms of what counts as “successful”, in any
case, they have to carve out their own niche in society because they don’t fit in easily.

In whatever walks of life we can be found, we usually share a love of stories about parallel
world and mutants with wonderful powers to make the world a better place. Harry Potter and
the muggle/wizarding world is a great example, but there are many others ranging from the
Lord of the Rings to more recent ones like Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. We
love these stories because we have always felt that we are different and secretly wished that
we could change the world so that aligns more with our own values, the light side of the
Force, as it were.

There were the things us “hunter-gatherer” minds were daydreaming about as kids. As
teens, we might have wondered how real reality is or if we aren’t living in the Matrix after all.
As grown-ups, we may have managed to integrate into a “farmer” world, but we are unlikely
to have got rid of the feeling that we are different, perhaps we are even a bit paranoid and
afraid that we might get crazy or suffer from depression or social anxiety with unknown
causes. I have heard stories about gifted children who literally thought they were aliens
when they were kids, waiting for UFOs to come and pick them up and take them to a planet
that was their home. I have heard these stories first-hand from gifted people themselves and
psychologists who dealt with gifted children.

A lot of us haven’t been able to integrate into this farmer world. This is most likely true for
people with ASD who have problems understanding social conventions and people with
ADHD who barely manage to hold a 9-5 job. This is also true for many MENSA (a club of
high IQ individual) members, who haven’t achieved much in life with their high IQ and who
often suffer from mental problems such as depression and social anxiety. Hunter-gatherer
people often have an urge to change the world, and of course, often enough we fail and feel
powerless.

The parallel worlds of sensors and intuitives

“There are two types of people…” is the beginning of many jokes. In the Myers-Briggs
personality test (MBTI) there are 16 types, combinations of four dimensions:

You can take a free test that takes about 10 minutes on https://www.16personalities.com/
Depending on your results you get one of 16 four letter combinations and a label that
represents your personality type:

In the past, I didn’t really pay much attention to these kinds of personality tests as I
considered them unscientific (the majority of scientists and psychologists does) and not very
useful. The gold standard in personality psychology is the Big 5 (or OCEAN model) or more
recently the HEXACO model, with five and six personality dimensions (honesty-humility
added to the latter), respectively.
The main differences between these personality models are that the MBTI is based on so-
called “cognitive functions” devised by the Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung. and statistically
derived personality traits that clusters (e.g. conscientious people tend to be diligent,
conservative and more traditional than people who aren’t).

There are, however, obvious parallels between MBTI and the OCEAN model: extraversion is
the same, feeling corresponds to agreeableness and judging to conscientiousness. There is,
however, no straightforward correspondence between intuitives/sensors and any other
personality dimension.

When reading about personality types I often came across statements like “intuitives and
sensors don’t mix well” or that these are the hardest personality types to reconcile, sensors
being practical doers and intuitive being visionary dreamers in extreme cases. I personally
definitely belong to the latter category: INFP, even sometimes called the “dreamer” bordering
on INTP “thinker”.

I started doing the Myers-Briggs test with all of my classes and each time I found a similar
picture: similar types sit next to each other. The students who have the same MBTI often tell
me that they have been friends since early childhood.
What you can see that from this seating chart is that personality types tend to “bond” like
molecules. The more similar two individuals are the more similarly they tend to experience
the world and the more easily they bond. There is an empty seat between two types that are
opposites (ENFP/ISTJ) and an empty seat between the outsider (INTJ) who hasn’t found
anybody to bond with and the rest of the classmates in the back row.

Outsiders are almost always IN (introverted intuitives) types, most typically INTJ/INFJ with
social anxiety. IN types are the rarest of all types and find it hard to connect to other types.
These students are often extremely difficult when it comes to collaborating with other
classmates or giving a presentation in front of the whole class. In general, the quiet students
are introverts (no big surprise) and occasionally also extroverted intuitive (EN) who haven’t
found anybody to bond with and are quasi outsiders despite being extroverts.

In general, the students can mostly identify with their results and their type descriptions.
Students are often happy to read these descriptions, as they become aware that they are
really “different” when schools treat them all like they were the same. Some types, especially
the IN tyes are relieved when reading their descriptions, as they have the feeling that they
are real “human beings” rather than some weirdos they used to think they were. I have seen
students with tears in their eyes more than once.

These results ask for explanations. Why is it that N types don’t fit in easily? Just because
they are less practical is not much of an explanation. Why do N types have certain traits like
being overthinkers and a risk to become outsiders? And there were many more traits I found
worthy of investigation, e.g. why do N types like elementary school less than S types, but
love theoretical subjects more than S types in highschool? And why do many N-type gifted
children fail in school?

Where does mutual attraction come from?

In a highly interesting paper, Friendship and natural selection Nicholas A. Christakis and
James H. Fowler describe that people tend to find their friends among genetically similar
people. That means that friends are more related to each other (the equivalent of fourth
cousins) than to people outside their circle. There might be several possible reasons for this
phenomenon. The possibility that fascinates me most is selection via personality types, i.e.
people choose other people with a similar personality type as friends and partners.

Helen Fisher has long been studying dating sites and has identified four personality types:
and their corresponding dominant hormones (you can take the test here:
https://theanatomyoflove.com/relationship-quizzes/helen-fishers-love-test/)

These types tend to find friends and partners within their own group, with the exception of
directors and negotiators, who tend to choose each other as romantic partners. Helen
Fisher’s types translate well into MBTI. My own type would be negotiator and my MBTI
group is NF. It doesn’t take much time to figure out the other types. Here are the
corresponding groups:

One thing that is striking about this pattern is the break of symmetry. If one chose to group
the types by logic you would get: SJ, SP, NJ, NP. So, not only do NT and NF break the
symmetry, but they also differ in that mate choice is out-group. Matters become a little bit
clearer when one considers that T types are more male (more testosterone) and F types are
more female (more estrogen), even though each group contains a considerable percentage
of the other sex.

Choosing partners from the same or different group is called “assortative mating”. This is a
little known phenomenon that explains why certain traits and disorders like autism and
schizophrenia tend to occur in the same families.

Every theory of personally has to account for the evolution of personality traits. Why were
some traits more successful for surviving and mating than others? Which selective pressure
were at work in shaping different personality types and groups? Each one of the above
groups has traits that were most likely shaped by natural selection and then maintained
through assortative mating in sexual selection. What in our past environment was it that
shaped these traits?

Hunter-gatherers vs farmers

Scientists used to think that the human mind was a blank slate (John Locks’s famous tabula
rasa) which was written on by culture. However, evolutionary psychology and increasingly
genetics are disproving this idea. A lot of traits have a genetic component, e.g. how
conscientious a person is, their parenting style, or whether they are night owls or early birds.

Evolutionary psychologists used to believe that everybody is a hunter-gather psychologically

speaking. However, that is not true. The few thousand years since the time farming was
invented did have a genetic impact. Farmers compared to hunter-gatherers needed to be
more hard-working, more conscientious (cf. Daniel Nettle) and more defensive of their
property. On the flip side, they have become less generous (but only to outgroup members),
less egalitarian and more status-seeking (accumulated wealth allowed for status). As William
von Hippel points out in his great book “The Social Leap” the highly sharing and caring
hunter-gatherer attitude towards everybody in the group would have been highly
disadvantageous for early farmers.

Farming would have involved quite a lot of cognitive, personality and behavioral changes.
Strong focus on work, routine and conscientiousness were among them. Hunter-gatherer, on
the other hand, needed to be more flexible and vigilant. Thom Hartman argues that ADHD is
a manifestation of the hunter-gatherer mind, which is easily distractible (potential dangers,
etc.) but has the ability to hyperfocus. Unfortunately, in our modern world ADHD minds often
become dysfunctional as a farmer mind would obviously be much more adapted to a 9-5 job
or a long school day than a hunter-gatherer mind. Sleep patterns might be part of the
package: hunter-gatherers needed to be flexible, whereas for farmers is was more
advantageous to get a good night's sleep and rise with the sun. Night owls are therefore
more likely to have inherited a hunter-gatherer mind than early risers.

Another problem for early farmers would have been parenting and teaching. As Peter Gray
shows in his highly recommendable book “Free to Learn” hunter-gather children spend most
of their time playing, thus learning everything they need as grown-ups through peer-learning
and self-directed learning. My hunch is that the majority of kids with oppositional defiant
disorder in addition to those diagnosed with ADHD and a tendency to be autodidacts in
schools have inherited hunter-gatherer minds, whereas the ones who easily adapt to the
school system have inherited farmer minds. For farmers it was probably highly important to
formally teach their children early on so they could help with the many daily chores.
Not only children are treated in this egalitarian way, but also women are considered equal
and not supposed to be submissive to their husbands. There is no concept of “pater familias”
and there is less sexual dimorphism than in farmer societies, which can not only be seen in
cultural artifacts (e.g. fewer and less opulent jewellery) but also physically as men don’t
show typically male digit ratios.

The following table shows a list of traits typical for hunter-gatherer vs. farmer minds. All of
them have been found to have a genetic component. Of course, also mixed traits occur and
culture and an individual’s life trajectory might override genetic tendencies.

hunter-gatherer farmer

High on personality trait “openness”, low on High on personality trait

“conscientiousness” “conscientiousness”, low on “openness”

Strongly (actively) egalitarian status-seeking

Tendency towards out-group sociality, more Tendency towards in-group sociality

accepting of diversity (e.g. different (identifies more strongly with a core group,
sexuality, refugees, etc.) like family, religious group or sports team)

More liberal ideology More conservative ideology

Tendency to wanting fewer children Tendency to wanting more children

Permissive child-rearing attitude Authoritative - authoritarian child-rearing,

“helicopter parenting”

Night owls Early risers

“Lazier” (when it comes to physical work More hard-working

and chores)

highly rebellious when feeling personal Individualistic and competitive, but also
freedom and values are threatened, more conformist and highly loyal to their
otherwise very prosocial attitude and non- core group
competitive

Less interest in small-talk and gossip Higher interest in small-talk and gossip
The evolution of personality groups according to subsistence
type

Going back to our personality types, it seems clear that early farmer evolved most likely SJ
traits and that hunters were NT and gatherers NF types. However, there remains a fourth
group: SPs. So far, I have followed the logic that the mode of subsistence had the biggest
impact on personality traits. Continuing this logic, it makes sense to look for a subsistence
economy with selective pressures on high dopamine.

Moreover, we know from MBTI that SP types are spontaneous, flexible and can become
daredevil risk-takers. Enter pastoralists:

From: Pastoralism

We now get a complete picture of personality groups according to subsistence economy:

Of course, just hypothesising about evolutionary-based personality groups doesn’t make

them real. What is required is genetic proof and I hope modern gene sequencing will provide
the proof soon. It could also explain an interesting fact about genetic similarities between
human groups:
In the meantime, we have to look for other clues on how to identify people belonging to the
hunter-gatherer neurotribes.

Gifted people: hunter-gatherer minds

Many people who are interested in the MBTI are aware of a striking statistic that says that
intuitive types have much higher ratios among the gifted:

Of course, that doesn’t mean that all N types are gifted people, just that they have a higher
chance to be among the gifted. My oldest son (INFP) showed many signs of giftedness at a
very early age. He was highly curious and learned the alphabet around 12 months old and
was a fluent reader by age two. By age three he could multiply and was interested in a
variety of subjects ranging from dinosaurs to geography and he wouldn’t stop learning until
he knew everything about his special topic, i.e. all the countries in the world, the names of
200 dinosaurs, etc. What he was most interested in: finding patterns, like learning different
alphabets and solving puzzles:

https://youtu.be/oC6zW-ztLSs

Why should hunter-gatherer types be more frequently among the gifted than other types? My
hunch is that for early farmers life was more predictable than for hunter-gatherers and once
they had learned everything they needed to know, sticking to routine was the best strategy.
The same wasn’t true for hunter-gatherers. Hunting skills still had to be honed long beyond
childhood (the older hunters are usually the best ones) and their environment was more
prone to change. All this required a lifelong openness to learning. This might also explain
why gifted kids are so obsessed with learning about something they deem important. In the
past, they would have had to learn about hundreds of plant, insect and animal species, that
were less crucial for survival for the children of farmers.

The giftedness curse

I have met many people online who are envious of the gifted. However, when you talk to
gifted people they aren’t always as happy about it as one might innocently expect. When my
son was 8 years old, I explained to him that he was gifted. My son’s reaction: he cried,
became angry and told me that is wasn’t a gift, but a curse.

I was puzzled - how can being a super-learner be a curse. All the students in the school I
teach envied him for his learning powers. However, the truth is it had already started to dawn
on me in kindergarten that being gifted is more often a burden than being a source of
happiness in life. Gifted people find happiness more rarely in life, and it’s not because they
are not programmed to be happy, it’s because the way we are programmed to be happy is
increasingly not working in our modern, stressful world. Gifted children are highly sensitive
and being perceived as “different” and not fitting in is devastating for them. Many gifted
children, in particular girls, try to hide their giftedness in order to appear “normal”.
When my son started kindergarten, the first year he played all by himself. The second-year
he made two friends (being introverted that was actually all he needed) and in the third year,
he tried to integrate into the group by starting to speak the local dialect. He failed abysmally
and sounded like a non-native speaker. He has since then given up speaking the local
dialect. It doesn’t come naturally to him, he can only try to imitate it, like an actor imitates a
foreign language.

Not being able to fit in is often blamed on the “difference in communication range” between
gifted and neurotypicals, however, that is only a half-truth. My son has no problem
communicating and playing with his three younger siblings at home. At school, he seems to
be mute. There is definitely more to this phenomenon than a communication barrier
consisting of a different range in vocabulary. This is a rather recent phenomenon and is
irrelevant in our evolutionary history. It seems more likely that introverted intuitives perceive
that their environment is not the kind of environment they were programmed for and often
become extremely shy and cautious. I have heard stories about IN children who would never
play with other children at the playground, but they would sit there for hours and closely
observe all the actions and reactions of the kids playing there.

If the gifted are part of the hunter-gatherer neuro-tribe, who else is?

The striking similarities between gifted and autistic children

If hunter-gatherer children are different from farmer children, it should be expected that other
kids share similar developmental trajectories as gifted kids. Right from the moment when my
son started to read around age one I was both delighted and worried. I had read about a
symptom called “hyperlexia”, that is quite common in children with ASD, just as common as
in children who are gifted. The difference, hyperlexia in children with ASD is often
accompanied by learning problems (surprisingly also verbal) whereas hyperlexic kids without
ASD are generally bright.

Darold Treffert distinguishes between three types of hyperlexia:

1. Neurotypical hyperlexia, i.e. gifted or precocious children

2. Hyperlexia in ASD children
3. A mixed type that shows signs of autism and then continues to develop in an NT
way.

Interestingly it looks like type 3 is on the way to developing autism and then takes the
trajectory of type one. I think all three cases are most likely to be found in hunter-gatherer
type children that take different trajectories. Even though a lot of ASD people favour a strong
genetic causality for ASD, I personally favour the hypothesis that all of these trajectories are
more dependent on (perhaps just subtle) differences in the environment.

At the time I tried to get answers to the question if my son was more likely autistic or gifted or
both by even writing to the world-renowned autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen.
However, nobody could really give me an answer. I just had to wait. Fortunately, my son
didn’t show most of the typical struggles of autistic children. He even developed an acute
sense for puns, his favourite type of humour.

That, however, is not the end of the stories. Despite not showing any major disabilities
typical for children with ASD, such as learning disabilities and a supposed lack of empathy,
there were some striking similarities with ASD children, most salient of all his inability to
connect to other children and his “special interests”, which varied from numbers and letters
as a toddler to dinosaurs in kindergarten.

The Davidson Institute, a private foundation serving profoundly gifted children up to the age
of 18, cites observed characteristics common to gifted kids and those with ASD, which
include:

● Verbal fluency or precocity

● Excellent memories
● Fascination with letters or numbers
● Specialized areas of focus or interest
● Hypersensitivity to sensory stimuli
● Memorization of factual information at an early age

All of these traits were true for my son, too. And there were more, as I was able to observe
from an ASD child among my relatives:

● social anxiety
● gets easily frustrated
● sticking to routines and fear of change of environment
● lagging behind in emotional development
● lagging behind in motor development/clumsiness
● neotenous traits, including delayed skeletal development.
● fussiness
● picky eater
● being skinny

It turned out that the similarities between the gifted and ASD children did not only include
psychological and behavioural traits but also physical traits, such as looking younger. Both
my sons lag behind their peers in growth and skeletal development. A roentgenologist
confirmed to us that our oldest son had the skeleton of a 10-year-old at age 12 In online
forums I found a lot of high IQ people as well as ASD people (or both simultaneously) who
confirmed my suspicion: they often looked younger than their peer during their
developmental year, even into their twenties. I myself was constantly asked for an ID when
ordering alcohol in a bar in my twenties.

ASD is frequently found in families with high IQ members, e.g. engineers and university
professors. Silicon Valley has one of the highest rates of ASD cases in the world. Geeks and
aspies seem to be relatives.
Another interesting fact about children with ASD is that they tend to have fathers who were
already quite old at the birth of their first child (not necessarily the autistic child). This fact
has spawned the “mutation load” hypothesis of autism, i.e. that autism is due to increased
mutations in older males. This hypothesis, however, is most likely to be nonsense. Often the
mothers of ASD children are also older at birth and what is more significant, genes involved
in ASD are ancient. Many of them might even date back to the time of Neanderthal genetic
admixture 40.000 years ago.

ADHD, the hunter-gatherer hypothesis and orchid children

When I came up with my hunter-gatherer vs farmer hypothesis I was researching personality
differences between people (e.g. openness to experience), giftedness, ASD and altruism in
connection with the OXTR gene. No other research at that stage pointed to a hunter-
gatherer origin of these phenomena until I discovered Thom Hartmann’s hunter-gatherer
hypothesis in connection with ADHD. In brief: Hartmann speculated that ADHD might have
benefitted hunter-gatherers in the Savannah due to the hyperfocus it comes with more than
the farmers that came later who required more routine focus on their work. You can imagine
ADHD a bit like a radar that circles around until it hits something interesting and then
hyperfocuses.

ADHD is linked to the DRD4-7R allele, which is associated with novelty seeking. This variant
has a much higher occurrence in nomadic populations (hunter-gatherers and pastoralists)
than among sedentary farmer populations.

Hyperfocus is not only common in ADHD, but also in ASD (special interests) and gifted
children. My gifted son wouldn’t stop learning about a new special interested until there
wasn’t much left to learn about it. He was hyperlexic as a toddler and learned three different
alphabets around two years of age. He was so focused on learning each alphabet that it took
him merely a few days to learn the Russian and Greek alphabets:

My hunter-gatherer hypothesis had come full circle and ADHD was only another piece in the
puzzle. ADHD is often comorbid with

● Oppositional Defiant Disorder

● Depression
● Anxiety
● Hypersensitivity
● Bipolar Disorder
● Conduct Disorder
● Tourette Syndrome
● Sensory Integration Disorder
● Learning Disorder
● Dyslexia
 ● Early Speech/Communication problems
● Sleep disorders
● Eating disorders (and picky eating in childhood)
● Substance abuse
● Addictive behaviours and addiction to digital media

My hunter-gatherer hypothesis had already “predicted” many of these traits as a

consequence of a mind that is programmed to work in a different environment than in a
“farmer world”. Extreme childhood anxiety and depression are hard to understand otherwise,
as the kids often haven’t experienced a trauma that would explain their condition. One
“solution” would say, the kids have a genetic defect, as ADHD, as well as many of the other
conditions, run in families. However, there are no “recent” mutations that would point to
genetic defects, all of the involved genes are ancient genes, part of our hunter-gatherer
heritage.

You often hear stories about six-year-old gifted children who find the world extremely unjust
and they wish they had never been born. Gifted kids are more prone to commit suicide as
teenagers of adults and above all gifted kids are often “orchid children”, i.e. they may turn
into beautiful flowers or just wither away. There is also a high incidence of "twice-
exceptional" gifted kids, i.e. kids who are both gifted and have learning disabilities (typically
ADHD, dyslexia and ASD).

In my work as a teacher, I have found that “hunter-gatherer” kids tend to be among my star
students, as well as being overrepresented in special education. Here is the motley crew of
hunter-gatherer kids in schools:

● The gifted (i.e. excellent grades plus tend to choose difficult college majors after high
school)
● the creative kids (interested in writing, creating videos and animations, etc.)
● Special ed kids (ADHD, ASD, ODD, etc.)
● The outcasts (isolated kids with social anxiety)
● The “weirdos”: Emos, Goths, geeks, and nerds
● Teens with self-harming behaviour (cutting, substance abuse).

All of them non-neurotypical hunter-gatherer minds. Not all of them suffer from ADHD, but
symptoms tend to overlap. If you think of Einstein you can assume that many of them would
have applied to him, like ASD, early speech disorder, dyslexia, ADHD and depression.

ADHD has also some other surprising links. When two of my hunter-gatherer students were
talking about their iron-deficiencies recently, I was reminded that I had the same condition
myself as a kid. A few minutes of googling later I found out that there is a well-known
connection between ADHD and iron deficiency. While this article here claims that iron
deficiency causes ADHD, I think it is more likely that there is simply a correlation. Hunter-
gatherer kids (gifted, ASD) tend to be picky eaters in childhood.

I have to note here, that high risk for ADHD is not restricted to hunter-gatherer types. Thom
Hartman does not make a distinction between “farmer” and “pastoralist” types. A lot of the
cases he discusses as “hunter-gatherer” cases are really “pastoralist” cases. From my
experience as a teacher, the “impulsive” types tend to be “pastoralist” types, whereas the
inattentive and mixed ADHD types are most certainly hunter-gatherer type children.

The psychology and biology of gifted children and highly

intelligent people
After identifying my motley crew of “hunter-gatherer” kids among the gifted, ASD and
partially ADHD children I felt there was something crucial missing, so I shifted my focus back
to the gifted and high IQ people.

Much has been written about gifted and high IQ people and to a large extent, the focus has
been on their cognition, for obvious reasons. As many parents of gifted children can attest,
these kids can be quite challenging for any parent: from daily chores, such as buckling up
the kiddo in a car seat to the point when he or she fails in conventional schools. They are
often difficult even as babies, known as hyperactive babies, highly curious, but also cry
easily, sleep irregularly and throw a lot of tantrums as toddlers.

While cognitive psychology has been a passion of mine since my early years at university,
there comes a point when you can’t explain giftedness in cognitive terms anymore. For
example, when your kid prefers to cry for an hour over some simple piece of homework he
could easily do in a matter of a few minutes and threatens you to run away from home. Why
would an eight-year-old child say "I wish I was never born"? Such behaviour would leave any
parent just puzzled and perplexed. What is the biological foundation of such seemingly
irrational behaviour?

Here are some traits gifted kids typically display, that have little to do with cognition:

● look younger than their age/have neotenous traits

● look more “unisex”, i.e. they don’t accentuate their gender
● start sex later than their peers
● have a highly developed sense of justice
● might be clumsy and/or ADHD sufferers
● tend to be socially awkward and at least a bit autistic;
● tend to suffer from social anxiety
● are likely into “alternative reality” stuff like fantasy, sci-fi, comics, etc.
● are playful and many of them really heavily into computer gaming
● might be quite lazy and reluctant to do work when they don’t see any point
● as a consequence, might show signs of ODD (oppositional defiant disorder)
 ● picky eaters
● highly sensitive (HSPs)
● extrinsic motivation (like grades at school or money) is much less important than
intrinsic motivation (their passions)

I still couldn’t account for half of the traits on the above list, so I turned to evolutionary
biology. r/K selection seems to explain a lot: highly intelligent people have faster brain
growth in infancy but grow more slowly in general. This would explain why y two boys
(both IN types) are both quite short for their age and their skeleton is almost two years
behind the average. It also explains why ASD children typically have relatively older fathers.

What in our biology could make people grow more slowly? The answer is probably buried
deep in our past: hunter-gatherers grew up more slowly than later farmers and herders who
had more caloric intake at their disposal. They were highly egalitarian as they couldn’t
accumulate wealth and that also made them highly defiant when facing hierarchical power
structures (European colonialists never really could “domesticate” hunter-gatherers).
One by one those giftedness traits began to make sense: picking eating and being highly
sensitive were probably more advantageous out in the wilderness than in a farming village.

Hunter-gatherers are also more monogamous than pastoralists, who have the earliest onset
of puberty and the shortest life span among the different early modes of subsistence (the
third being farmers or SJ in Myers-Briggs). It is, therefore, no big surprise that highly
intelligent people do not accentuate their gender, whereas people who inherited their
personality from herders or pastoralists do so to a high degree, i.e. sexual dimorphism is
diminished in hunter-gatherers as well as gifted people. Hunter-gatherers are also quite
playful into adulthood, as play is used to reduce conflict among them. Farmer personalities
are more serious and business-like in contrast to hunter-gatherer personalities.

The final piece of the puzzle is trying to explain why hunter-gatherer personalities should be
more intelligent than their farmer and herder counter-parts:

One explanation is that hunter-gatherers needed more cognitive fluidity and vigilance (hence
the ADHD) to survive in the Savannah than farmers who had to rely far more on
conscientiousness, routine and hard work. This explanation still doesn’t account for why
hunter-gatherers (Ns) tend to be more intelligent on average than pastoralists (SPs). Here
the answer lies probably in natural selection. Hunter-gatherers have an out-group sociality
and sharing and caring attitude. In mixed hunter-gatherer, farmer and herder societies
hunter-gatherer minds who were of average intelligence probably lost out (nice guys came
last) in the genetic race and there were high selective pressures on hunter-gatherer
genotypes to become more intelligent.

So, higher IQ might at the end of the day be nothing more than a protective mechanism! Just
like social anxiety: if you are very open, you better have a defence shield in place!
Introverted intuitives are already socially anxious by the time they go to kindergarten
because they are aware they are different. By the time they are in their teens, they might be
complete outcasts because they don't play power/alpha games and as they tend not to be
violent they can become easy targets for bullying. The extraverted intuitives also are in
danger of becoming outsiders and social phobics during their teens, unless they already
have an established network with other hunter-gatherer minds.
In modern slang, we could say that gifted kids/high IQ people with a hunter-gatherer
personality run on the updated operating system “Hunter-gatherer v2.0”.

Life-history strategy and personality traits

So, what exactly are r/K selected traits? According to scientists (e.g. Del Giudice
Evolutionary Psychopathology) life history has a huge influence on personality traits, e.g.
longer lifespans would entail later sexual maturity, more parental investment and less risky
behavior. Life spans in our evolutionary past varied according to our ancestors' mode of
subsistence:

Semi-nomadic pastoralists and horticulturalists have the shortest average life span at
approximately 31 years, followed by highly mobile hunter-gatherer societies at 38.5 years,
and sedentary agricultural communities at 52.2 years. (Barbara R. Hewitt, 2003)

There are, however, many indications that for early farmers life was harder and probably
shorter than those of hunter-gatherers, even though people in more modern agricultural
societies live longer. It isn’t hard to see those early farmers easily outbred hunter-gatherers
due to higher fertility rates even though they might have had shorter life-spans.
There are plenty of indications that pastoralists, who experience a lot of violence and
instability had the shortest lifespans. It is likely that evolution entrenched adaptive traits
genetically, e.g. farmers with higher levels of serotonin (conscientiousness and future-
oriented planning) were more successful. For pastoralists, whose lives were shorter, taking
risks (dopamine) would have been advantageous for survival and mating. For hunter-
gatherers, a childlike openness for learning in new environments and humbleness for a non-
violent co-existence would have been the most advantageous personality traits.
We can assume that in many places over the world these types interbred. E.g. in Europe
early farmers interbred with European hunter-gatherers and later Indo-European and other
step pastoralists (Huns, Turkic peoples, Magyars, etc.). Their personality traits also mixed,
but there are genetic hints that different personality types tend to choose their friends and
partners from their own group. This would prevent total mixture and making sure that some
traits occur in clusters.

r/K theory and life history studies would predict the following traits:

Shortest lifespan medium (farmer) Long lifespan (HG)

(pastoralist)

Most risk-taking/least fearful Least risk-taking/most

fearful

Earliest onset of puberty Latest onset of puberty

Many offspring Few offspring

Least paternal investment Most paternal investment

Most sociosexual Most pair-bonded

 Higher sexual dimorphism Lower sexual dimorphism

Most in-group social Most out-group social

Del Giudice writes in Evolutionary Psychopathology that trait “openness” is negatively

correlated with fertility for people reaching their sexual maturity from the advent of the pill in
the 1960s. As I have argued previously, hunter-gatherer types want to have fewer children,
in particular in the absence of the typical social network (it takes a village to raise a child).
On the other end of the life-history spectrum for pastoralist types, it seems likely that they
prefer not to have children due to commitment-phobia.

Romantic relationships and reproduction

Our ancestral environments have long gone, so how successful are these types at
reproducing nowadays? The distribution table of MBTI types may be a good indication of
how successful each type has been in the past millennia since the advent of agriculture:
Obviously, farmer types are in the most predominant ones with around 40%, followed by
pastoralist types (~35%) and finally hunter-gatherer types (~25%).

In general S types are more successful if they are J (high in serotonin/conscientiousness)

and introverted. Paradoxically the extroverted S types tend to have fewer children exactly
because their evolutionary programme to become high in status makes them prefer to
pursue their careers rather than focus on family life.

With the N types, we see a reversal of these patterns: the extroverted and low serotonin are
reproductively more successful. It is pretty much clear why the extroverted N types have
more offspring: it is easier for them to find other N types as partners (they also tend to be
less monogamous than the introverted N types). What is puzzling, however, why the more
conscientious NJ have fewer children when - like their S counterparts - they are financially
more successful?
 1. There are probably two main reasons for this.
self-actualisation is highly important for hunter-gatherer types and like their ES types
they might find having (more) children may be an obstacle for their careers
2. Hunter-gatherers rely on an extensive social network for alloparenting. NJ dread
having a lot of children as being more conscientious means that more children would
be even more highly taxing in terms of time spent on parenting

If there are people who typically want to have no children at all it is NJ types who live
isolated from their relative or in places far away from them.

Here is an updated table of r/K selected traits in each personality group that includes
information from Helen Fisher’s research as well as predicted traits according to life-history
strategy:

hunter-gatherers farmers pastoralists

Late-onset of puberty average onset of puberty Early-onset of puberty

Tendency towards Tendency towards Tendency towards

monogamy; increasing monogamy; gets lost with polygamy
status doesn’t change that increasing status
much

Look for: soulmates Look for: helpmate Look for: playmates

Difficulties in finding Mostly still want to get Reluctant to get married

partners and reluctant to married and have children and have children when
have children in a once they have reached the there are so many options
competitive society desired status in modern life

Higher divorce rates due to Lower divorce rates Higher divorce rates due to
partner mismatch and/or promiscuous tendencies
prioritizing self-actualization

More egalitarian more status-oriented more status-oriented

 Out-group social More In-group social More In-group social

Often dislike routine, playful Love routine, industrious Dislike routine, artful
and imaginative

Neurotypicality, normality and psychopathology

The life-history model of psychopathology (e.g. Del Giudice 2016) postulates that certain
disorders are associated with the fast end or the slow end of life-history strategy. Dark triad
traits (psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism) would be more typically found on the
fast end (early puberty) of life history (higher-risk-taking, less empathy). ASD people would
more typically be found on the slow-end of the spectrum (later puberty, and they are typically
the children of parents who started to have children comparatively late themselves, which
has led to the erroneous assumption that ASD is due to accumulated mutations).

In my model of the evolution of life-history hunter-gatherers are on the slow end, early
farmers (who had harder lives) in the middle and pastoralists, who probably had the most
violent lives, on the fast end of the spectrum. The further a person lies outside the band of
"normality" the less neurotypical they are and the risk of mental disorders increases:

Our (western) world is arguably a farmer world, with its 9-5 routine jobs (farmers like to get
up earlier, so 9-5 is actually a compromise with other types) and its focus on productivity and
status. Of course, some aspects are more shifted towards other personality types, e.g.
mainstream media and the tourist industry are often more shifted towards the high dopamine
pastoralists, whereas social values such as life-long learning, tolerance of diversity and
egalitarianism are more shifted towards the hunter-gatherer side of the spectrum.

Non-farmer types often struggle with typical “farmer jobs” (e.g. administrative, office jobs), as
they tend to get bored easily with repetitive jobs. So they have to carve out their own niches;
pastoralists types often become entrepreneurs (their own bosses), artists and performers or
go for jobs farmer types tend to avoid (irregular working-hours), whereas hunter-gatherers
often go for geeky jobs like software developers or university teachers, social jobs, or really
create something unique that suits them.

What is interesting to note, is that the conscientious farmer types are dominated by
serotonin, which makes people more aware of social norms and conform to them as well as
less open towards diversity. Unfortunately for the other two personality types that create a
rather narrow band of “normality”, beyond which people soon become outsiders. To name a
banal example, where I live, most cars are grey, typically expensive, elegant and restricted
to a few popular models. Another example: the almost uniform American suburbs.

My hypothesis is that people outside that narrow band of normality are more prone to mental
disorders for a variety of reasons, ranging from lower-income and lower status to less
acceptable to the point of feeling or becoming outcasts. It is therefore not surprising that
ASD people show high rates of comorbidity with social anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation,
and BDP.

In brief, my hypothesis is that many mental disorders are a problem of evolutionary

mismatch, i.e. evolved traits become dysfunctional in a society for which they were not
programmed. Of course, this might not apply to all mental disorders, like psychopathology,
even though the symptoms might be aggravated through environmental mismatch. In this
case, a mind that is not calibrated to the constant focus serotonin provides.
Some common signs of serotonin deficiency include:

● Depression
● Changes in sleep
● Chronic pain
● Memory or learning issues
● Anxiety
● Schizophrenia
● Problems with the body's internal clock
● Appetite issues.

Serotonin deficiency in the brain also occurs in OCD and ASD patients.
The life-history model also explains similarities between gifted and ASD people, who both
tend to be on the slow end of the spectrum.

This model would also support Ruth Karpinski's "Hyper-brain/hyper-body" hypothesis, which
states that high IQ people (typically on the slow end of the life-history spectrum) would suffer
not only from some of the above mentioned mental disorders (ASD, ADHD, social anxiety)
but also more often from physiological problems such as allergies and asthma. My personal
assumption is that the physiological conditions are caused by heightened stress levels
(cortisol), that arise for hunter-gatherer minds living in a farmer society.

Modern hunter-gatherers at the workplace

The world of work with its 9-5 routine jobs is pretty much a farmer (SJ) world. Consequently,
it is also the farmer types who are happiest with their jobs as well as the highest earners. In
particular, the XSTJs are among the highest earners:

High serotonin (J) predicts higher income. So does high testosterone (T). Introverts have
higher stress levels in an extroverted work environment and typically would not have
positions in upper management, therefore. Hunter-gatherer types earn less than
framer/pastoralist types as materialistic goods and display of status (e.g. expensive cars)
aren’t as important to them as self-actualization.

Ironically there is almost an inverse relationship between giftedness and financial success.

With the exception of the INTJs (typically found in jobs such as university professors,
engineers and lawyers), all of the IN types are among the low earning group. High IQ,
therefore, doesn’t necessarily predict financial success and sometimes it is even negatively
correlated. Most N types are very humble and non-competitive, in a typical hunter-gatherer
fashion.

You might be able to spot a hunter-gatherer type by the amount of coffee they need to get
through a typical workday. Hunter-gatherer types often struggle in the modern workplace for
several reasons:

● They find routine jobs boring

● Routine jobs also kill their creativity
● They haven’t got the sustained 9-5 focus farmers have, but the can focus even
harder when working on interesting tasks (working all-nighters is not rare for them)
● They might suffer from ADHD which actively interferes with 9-5 jobs and they might
not be able to hold a job
● They are highly sensitive hand have higher cortisol level in an extroverted work
environment
● Unlike farmer types, they find it hard to switch off after work and typically don’t
separate work and relaxation
● Their problems are more likely to interfere with regular sleep
● They are at a higher risk of bourn-out
In particular, the fabled INTPs have a hard time being successful. As they are the archetypal
orchid children they might end up as the founders of Google (Larry Page and Sergey Brin
are both INTPs), but just as well as hobos.I have seen many people on Quora (a social
network with mostly HG types on it) ask the question: “What job can I do with high openness
and low conscientiousness [=NP]?”. Here is a table from a recent database that describes
typical personality profiles for a variety of jobs (in OCEAN)::

here is a link to a database: behavioral-ds/VocationMap

It is interesting to note that many employers would probably avoid employing people with
such a low conscientiousness level as INTPs have. And this is definitely one shortcoming of
the OCEAN model, low levels are usually considered negative traits (at least true for low
conscientiousness, emotional stability, agreeability). The MBTI on the other hand, also
highlights the positive sides of the P (perceiving) trait, i.e. flexibility and versatility. Paired
with big-picture thinking these are great qualities in software developers.

Google is a great hunter-gatherer workplace. Even though INTPs only make up about 3% of
the population, they make up an estimated 30% of the highly skilled workforce at Google.
Google provides ample possibilities for hunter-gatherer types to de-stress and develop their
creativity with fringe benefits such as floating working hours, lots of possibilities to relax or
exercise during the workday, 20% creativity time plus plenty of free healthy foods.

Einstein (INTP) had a hard time finding a job after graduation. Fortunately he found a job as
a patent clerk (he wasn’t a good employee, definitely never nominated for the employee of
the month) that allowed him enough free time to develop his ideas. You can’t pay creative
people by the hours they work. That is not how creativity works.

One of the biggest obstacles for creative people like the NPs in becoming financially
successful might be education to begin with. As this table shows (N)P types consistently get
worse grades at school than what can be predicted from their actual skill-level. This is
because they struggle with sequential and rote learning.

The problems of hunter-gatherer minds in schools, like social anxiety and their struggles in a
traditional educational system will be discussed in the following chapters.

Social anxiety rising among kids and teenagers

Anybody working with a lot of young people nowadays knows that social anxiety has been
increasing in the past twenty years or so. Many possible causes have been proposed, from
smartphones to genetics. While I don’t think that smartphone “abuse” is a cause (rather a
symptom) I do think the genetic part has a lot to do with personality.
The following personality traits (OCEAN) are linked to social anxiety:

● Neuroticism
● Introversion
● Openness to experience

The “People who are introverts and very open to new experience tend to have the highest
levels of social anxiety” (see here). While neuroticism and introversion are perhaps no big
surprise, openness seems to be in need of an explanation. It is not hard to see that these
personality traits belong to the hunter-gatherer neuro tribe, in particular to IN types.

About 10-15% of pre-schoolers are already painfully shy, so there definitely seems to be a
strong genetic component. This figure also corresponds to the number of introverted intuitive
(IN) types. IN types are rare and many often realise as kids they are different from the
majority of people, probably increasing their inborn social sensitivity. When I started using
MBTI for my research, I quickly found out that it was not only me (INFP) who was very shy
as a kid, but also pretty much of my IN friends, my two IN sons and many of my IN students
at school. I take the test with all of my classes, and the very shy students are almost always
IN, occasionally also IS and to my initial surprise also EN students, as I didn’t expect
extraverted teens to suffer from social anxiety.

My hypothesis is that social anxiety depends a lot on (not) making connections with others.
In kindergarten, my INTJ son had and ENJT best friend and an ENFJ friend who he did like
a lot but grew tired of more quickly. IF you see the four letters as “magnets” that attract each
other, it is easy to see how kids connect with each other. Both boys were rather
technologically minded (T) and had hunter-gatherer minds

If childhood can be bad for IN kids, their teens can be much worse. IN kids often look
younger and may show delayed bodily development compared to other kids. What happens
is, that the precious kids (often pastoralist, as these are often the first to enter puberty) tend
to establish a social hierarchy with bullying and teasing and their easiest victims are the IN
kids, as they are both behind in development and “egalitarian”, i.e. they are not
“programmed” to fight for an “alpha position” or to fight at all. It is easy to see how shyness
can quickly develop into social anxiety under such circumstances. Even without bullying
social isolation can get worse as IN kids can’t understand the other kids' obsession with sex,
cars, competitive sports, branded clothes, make-up, etc.

The same can be true for extraverted intuitives (EN). Even though they might have many
friends in elementary school, they increasingly don’t understand them and become isolated,
too. Whereas their IN counterparts might have already been diagnosed with ASD in
childhood, the EN kids might get diagnosed with ASD now that they are in their early teens,
because they didn’t show any signs of social isolation before.

Why is social anxiety rising? Because kids are less and less connected in early childhood:
fewer siblings, fewer possibilities to get connected, particularly if they are introverted. In that
case, even their parents' encouragement to make or meet friends are often futile. One father
told me that he had to bribe his son with buying video-games for him if he agreed to meet
kids from his school. He said, it cost him a lot of money, but it did help in the end.

Foundations of an Evolutionary Pedagogy

I have been a teacher for 20 years now despite having been confronted with a lot of
pedagogical and methodological ideas and theories none of those had an evolutionary
approach to teaching. Peter Gray’s book Free to Learn is a notable exception. Gray’s ideas
are based on learning in hunter-gatherer societies, in which there is no formal learning, no
coercion, little extrinsic motivation for learning (grades, “stars”, praise, etc.” and still children
become fully functioning members of their groups due to their inborn instincts to survive, play
and learn from older children and adults.

Formal teaching and schooling is basically an invention of agricultural societies as

agriculture made a certain degree of coercion necessary. Modern hunter-gatherers
consistently refuse to become farmers as it is too much trouble and work for them.
I have argued before that modern people are more or less the descendants of either early
farmers or hunter-gatherers, genetically kept partially apart by assortative mating through the
past 12 millennia since the origin of agriculture. This distinction corresponds roughly to the
distinction between intuitives and sensors in the Myers-Briggs/Jungian personality
framework.

In pedagogy, I have often encountered opposing ideas that correspond to “farmer” vs

“hunter-gatherer” (HG) “instincts” or values in education. Here are some of them:

farmer values hunter-gatherer values

objective is the integration of the learner objective is the independence of the

into society learner

fosters conformity fosters independence

standardization individualization

Extrinsic motivation (grades, “stars”, Intrinsic motivation (passion), non-

praise), partially driven by competitive competitive (the only competition is the
thinking and comparison between learner him/herself)
students

Learning is “work” attitude Learning is “growth” attitude

Sequential learning Big picture, integrated learning

Teacher-centred Student-centred

Rule-based learning Explorative learning

Mastery of sets of skills Lifelong learning and flexibility

Current trend towards more formal Current trend towards homeschooling

schooling or unschooling

Peter Gray is optimistic that in the near future the trends will shift towards hunter-gatherer
values and traditional schooling will be perceived as barbaric soon. Unfortunately, this is not
what I am experiencing as a teacher, the trends are more towards “farmer values”, i.e.
crammed curricula, more schooling and more (international) competitive thinking.
Apart from the fact that most students lose their curiosity, motivation and interest in the
subject matters themselves and study for grades and credits instead of developing a passion
for learning. This trend seriously hurts the “hunter-gatherer” kids, in particular, the highly
creative ones. These kids get filtered out by our school system because have difficulties with
the sequential learning, rote memorization and are often considered disorganized and lazy
by their teachers.

One can imagine that children who are programmed to learn freely struggle with the
coerciveness of elementary school. My gifted son who was able to read at age two and who
had been a highly curious child until elementary school suddenly became defiant and even
aggressive in first grade. He would rather cry an hour over homework that would have taken
him five minutes to do. This seemingly irrational behaviour can only be explained by inborn
instincts.

My research into personality types has led me to assume that the majority of children with
ODD (oppositional defiant disorder), ADHD and ASD children are probably among the
hunter-gatherer personality type and can therefore often be found in special ed. HG kids
might seem slow, lazy, dreamy and unmotivated in elementary school.
On the flip side also the majority of the gifted kids I have taught belong to the hunter-
gatherer group, which leads me to assume that hunter-gatherer children are very much the
same as “orchid children”, who might thrive or fade depending on their environment. They
might be hyperlexic (or at least early readers - pretty much all people I know who taught
themselves to read before school are HG people) or dyslexic. If my son hadn’t been able to
read fluently at age two, he might have easily turned out dyslexic. His teacher only saw a
slow, dreamy and sloppy kid in him and given his inattentive ADHD and defiant behaviour
this might easily have turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The objective of an evolutionary pedagogy should have as a scope an evolutionary

perspective on learning styles, not just categorizing them by three different types of sensory
input or eight different kinds of intelligence. Sequential learning vs. pattern learning style
might be a more meaningful category or rule-based vs explorative learning styles, as well as
a preference for being taught vs self-directed learning.

HG children are different from “farmer” children in the following traits:

● Relatively immune to extrinsic motivation like grades

● High performers when intrinsically motivated
● Special interests/passions way beyond the ordinary (e.g. knowing the names of 300
instead of 30 dinosaurs)
● Criticism can be absolutely detrimental to learning motivation
● Coercion most likely causes defiant rather than compliant behaviour
● May appear physically younger and emotionally less mature than their peers
● Preference for self-directed learning
● Highly sensitive to noise, light and other physical stimuli
● Less stress-resistent or resilient
HG children suffer more from stress and react with higher cortisol levels, which can often
lead to physical illness such as allergies, asthma or anaemia (especially high in children with
ADHD). I am afraid that schools actually might be partly to blame for their ailments and hope
that scientists and polygenic scores will be able to shed more light on the matter.

In middle and high schools, HG children are much more likely to be among the students who
drop out, get bullied (they are generally non-violent and frequently loners), self-harm or even
commit suicide. On the other hand, they are also among the high performers and highly
creative (a trait that hardly matters in many schools) children. As HG children are big
pictures thinkers it should be in the interest of schools, the economy and society that
education for them is an empowering experience rather than an obstacle in their lives.

December 26, 2019

© Andreas Hofer