Epigenetic Trauma: 1200 Bottleneck

 You know, I do believe in epigenetic trauma. It can't be used to explain many of the things they use it for, but it's very handy for the following.

 Science has found a bottleneck for homo erectus of about 1200 individuals. When the species was this endangered, keeping every single individual alive, as far as possible, was critically important. 

 I think that trauma has stuck with the species. Price is supply and demand. What's the price of a particular human when there are 8 billion of them? It's zero. Worse: it's nothing, less maintenance costs. (Slavery cast as died out because the product stopped paying for its own transaction costs.)

 A lot of human behaviour makes perfect sense assuming they never got over having a population of less than 2000. As if a few dozen dying here or there might cause the extinction of the entire species. 

 Of course, science isn't, yanno, reliable or anything. However, it's almost certain that something like this bottleneck happened one time or another since the time of australopithecus. We don't need this particular catastrophe to explain the screaming genetic trauma.

 Though it could also be simple spiritual mechanics. If humanity really is nothing but the shades of the dead, it means the dead almost got kicked out of not only life, but the afterlife. These humans are acting like they could go back to 1200 only because, like, they were there at the time. Or they personally knew someone who was and told them the story in between afterlives. 

 Alternatively they just really really really hated the queue times for the Earth server. I consider it more likely that the reason the population got so low was due to a lull in immortal deaths. The heavens declared peace, for a time.