Rachel’s Reviews > The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention > Status Update

“About 43,000 years ago, another human [...] invented something else quite extraordinary: a tool for counting. Over time he or she made twenty-nine marks (or notches) along the bone, and archaeologists speculate that these might have been produced for some kind of ritual or, more likely, were a form of a tally: a way of counting.” (pp. 115-116)

“We surveyed four hundred autistic adults like Jonah who had attended our clinic in Cambridge, and tragically we found that two-thirds of them had felt suicidal and one-third of them had actually attempted suicide. What more of a wake-up call does society need that autistic people are struggling and desperately vulnerable?” (p. 78)