Science

About 800,000 years ago, humanity got down to just 1,280 people

The fact that you exist is, statistically speaking, a little wild.

Researchers have discovered that, just a bit shy of a million years ago, humans nearly went extinct, falling to fewer than the number of students in my high school. About 1,280 breeding individuals*. That's it. That was the species. And they stayed at that razor-thin headcount for roughly 117,000 years, ground down not by a single catastrophe but by the slow violence of the Early-Middle Pleistocene: severe weather, brutal glacial cycles, an Ice Age that just kept going.

In a piece by Mark Wales, the numbers do most of the heavy lifting. The bottleneck erased an estimated two-thirds of our genetic diversity, and the lines that survived weren't necessarily the strongest or smartest. They were just the ones that happened to keep going. Bigger brains made it through. A lot of other traits didn't.

Most family trees, across most species, eventually end. Yours didn't. Every person you've ever met is a descendant of the same small group of ancient outlasters who, for reasons no one can fully explain, kept showing up.

* - To clarify, my high school did not have 1,280 BREEDING individuals.

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What’d we learn?

Last week, we shared the delightful revelation that some financial advisors recommend spending MORE on your hobbies.

What’s the financial relationship of GOOD readers with their hobbies? About a third of you are in too deep to say it out loud. I was in the minority on this one; I’m a hobby hoarder myself.

• Hard zero. I'm hobbyless. (24.7%)

• Enough to dabble, not enough to commit. (25.8%)

• Which hobby? I pick up a new one every few weeks. (17.2%)

• I can't tell you, my SO might hear. (32.3%)

GOOD reader Rolannlasnet spoke for the majority (in hushed tones, I presume): “I’ve been quilting for 30+ years and shudder to think what I’ve spent on my hobby…”

Society

Her Ph.D. in child development didn’t spare her from the new-mom panic

The "perfect mom" trap is an ugly feedback loop.

The first night home with a newborn is humbling for everyone. It was humbling for Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, too, and she literally has a Ph.D. in developmental psychology. Formula or breast? TV on or off? Daycare at five months, or is that a felony? In her piece, Schoppe-Sullivan (no relation) describes the exact spiral most new parents know by heart, and then explains why the spiral itself is the problem.

Her research has a name for it: parenting perfectionism. It's not just holding yourself to impossible standards. It's the creeping, Facebook-fueled certainty that everyone else is holding you to them, too. Parents who are most worried about being judged end up less confident, more stressed, and quicker to give up when their toddler bangs the plate for the millionth time.

There's a real definition of "good enough" parenting. It's quieter than you'd think, and it's almost the opposite of trying harder.

Environment

Suddenly, everyone wants to clean up the toxic sludge

A centuries-old hot potato just became a hot commodity.

For about as long as we've had heavy industry, the answer to "who's going to clean up this toxic mess?" has reliably been "don't look at me." That may be about to change, and the reason is gloriously on-brand for late-stage capitalism.

That rust-colored gunk seeping out of Appalachia's abandoned coal mines, the stuff staining 13,700 miles of American creek beds orange, is absolutely loaded with rare earth elements. That's been part of the problem, and it may become the solution. Rare earths are the metals inside smartphones, wind turbines, and military jets. The metals China controls 70% of, and we import 80% of. As West Virginia University researchers Hélène Nguemgaing and Alan Collins explain, the concentrations in the sludge are competitive with actual mined ore.

So the cleanup nobody wanted to fund just became the supply chain everybody wants a piece of. Now there's just one very American thing standing in the way.

On April 26, 1803, around one in the afternoon, a giant fireball streaked over Lower Normandy. A booming explosion followed, then six full minutes of rocks raining down on the fields outside L'Aigle, a quiet town about 90 miles northwest of Paris. By the time the dust settled, more than 3,000 stones were scattered across the countryside. The villagers, sensibly, started picking them up.

Most European scientists at the time flatly did not believe rocks could fall from space. The official line, inherited from Aristotle and politely defended for centuries, was that any "stone from the sky" had earthly origins. Volcanic, maybe. Atmospheric, sure. Cosmic? Don't be ridiculous. Meanwhile, peasants across Europe kept reporting fireballs and stone showers, and the savants of the day kept patting them on the head.

Enter Jean-Baptiste Biot, a 29-year-old physicist sent by the French Academy of Sciences. He spent nine days knocking on doors around L'Aigle, interviewing witnesses from every walk of life, mapping where the stones landed, and noting that the rocks looked nothing like anything from local quarries, foundries, or mines. He left Paris a skeptic. He came back fully converted, and his report, delivered that July, was so vivid and well-evidenced that the scientific establishment quietly changed its mind within months. The science of meteoritics was born from one young guy taking French villagers seriously.

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💬 From the group text…

I’ve seen 1,000 attempts at this. I was starting to think it couldn’t be done, and then, like Arthur approaching the sword in the stone, came Ethan.

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