The Fable of Phaethon: A Constrained Thought Experiment on Human Origins and the Law of Form

This paper develops the Phaethon hypothesis as a constrained thought experiment rather than an established empirical theory. Its starting point is a real scientific fracture in the human deep past: Hu et al. reported a severe ancestral bottleneck between approximately 930,000 and 813,000 years ago, with an estimated effective breeding population near 1,280 individuals persisting for about 117,000 years. A second constraint comes from Schmidt and Frank's Silurian Hypothesis, which clarified that a technological civilization at deep geological time depth would rarely survive as familiar artifacts and may persist only as chemical, isotopic, sedimentary, dynamical, or off-world traces. Within those constraints, the present paper reconstructs a speculative scenario in which a low-density, volatile-rich, larger-than-Earth world in the main-belt region, here called Phaethon, developed a high civilization, failed to govern its own energy and factional violence, and underwent high-energy cold disassembly. A remnant population reached Earth and entered a long reproductive constriction shaped by East African refugia, climatic oscillation, biological incompatibility, large-scale adaptation through terrestrial hominin physiology, and the continuation of pre-existing factional conflict. The hypothesis further incorporates the Australasian tektite event as a possible delayed high-energy impact datum close to the bottleneck window, while treating the Shanhaijing, Atlantis, and related mythic structures as low-ranking but theoretically suggestive forms of compressed memory. The paper assigns each element a distinct evidentiary rank and identifies failure conditions across population genetics, lunar and asteroid materials, micrometeorite records, tektite stratigraphy, paleoecology, and comparative mythology. Its philosophical center is the Law of Form: the claim that civilizations perish when their powers outrun their capacity to organize life, energy, memory, time, and collective action into a durable form.