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

The Phaethon hypothesis is developed as a preliminary, constrained thought experiment whose empirical status remains provisional. Its starting point is a real scientific fracture in the human deep past: Hu et al. reported a contested demographic window with unresolved structure 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. Subsequent population-genetic analyses have challenged the robustness and magnitude of that inference, so the window functions here as a disputed but important point of departure. A second constraint comes from Schmidt and Frank's Silurian Hypothesis, which clarified that a technological civilization at deep geological time depth may persist as chemical, isotopic, sedimentary, dynamical, or off-world traces. Within those constraints, the Phaethon scenario imagines a low-density, volatile-rich, larger-than-Earth world in the main-belt region, a high civilization whose biological engineering, orbital reach, and energy command gathered around planetary depth, a subsequent cold disassembly, a small remnant population reaching Earth, and a long reproductive constriction shaped by East African refugia, climatic oscillation, biological incompatibility, and adaptation through terrestrial hominin physiology. The Australasian tektite event enters as a possible delayed high-energy impact datum shortly after the reported bottleneck window, while the Shanhaijing, Atlantis, and related mythic structures enter as low-ranking but theoretically suggestive forms of compressed memory. Each element receives a distinct evidentiary rank and a set of 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.