The 5′ end of AUTS2 (autism-susceptibility-gene-2) has been under strong selection after divergence between humans and Neanderthals – this portion of the AUTS2 locus overlaps three evolutionarily accelerated non-coding regions featuring a large number (293) of SNPs differentiating modern from archaic humans (Green et al., 2010). Here, AUTS2 is linked to autism.