>>10413692Yes, especially when "autism" as a concept didn't even exist until the mid 50s. It didn't need to because before industrialized society autists were usually indistinguishable from everyone else as subsistence farming didn't require much forethought, only as society moved towards more and more technical jobs that demand good interpersonal communication skills (either on an assembly line or dev team) did some peoples' severe lack of those skills become a serious problem.
Combined with better brain imaging over the past 30 years due to MRIs, we can clearly see that most of them have abnormal brains as adults, meanwhile because all children attend all 12 years of school now we can clearly chart their progress from infancy to adulthood showing their development deficiencies.
(it also does not help that doctors benefit from giving out false positives anyway since parents will happily use autism as an excuse for their bad parenting, which leads to another set of problems from children taking mood control medicine before puberty which can affect their growth. Not much is known about this because this only got bad in the early 00s, so longitudal studies are only just starting to get usable data from gen Z)
