American scientists, who were seriously puzzled by the history of the emergence of such an unpleasant brain lesion as schizophrenia, revealed that this disease, although it has been accompanying humanity since time immemorial, nevertheless arose on the scale of planetary history not so long ago - approximately at the time when the ancient hominids split into our distant ancestors and Neanderthals. The latter, as it turned out, never suffered from schizophrenia, which is an evolutionary acquisition exclusively of Homo sapiens.
Schizophrenia, according to the scientific publication Biological Psychiatry, where the corresponding material was published, was known in antiquity, that is, the disease has a rich history, and, apparently, accompanies Homo sapiens from the very moment the species appeared.
“Surprisingly, science has not yet identified the specific factors that lead to the development of schizophrenia, but it is clear that these factors are mostly genetic. Schizophrenia, we believe, is the flip side of the evolutionary development of the brain, which at one time allowed people to gain intelligence, - say scientists who have studied the DNA of people susceptible to schizophrenia.
Kolesnikov Andrey