What the fuck happened?

Ok, I know this is pretty dry stuff, but this is too important to not post. If you're like me, you've been hearing about this whole credit crisis, and maybe you've had this basic idea of what went wrong. Something like "People got greedy, took on a bunch of risk that was stupid, and then got burned." Maybe a little more detail, maybe a little less. But if you're like me in another respect (less likely), you felt vaguely itchy about not really understanding the whole mess. I mean, the world is fucking ending (I don't actually recommend reading that), and I don't really get why. Until now!

Wired to the rescue. Fucking inspired journalism. Here's what happened.

Humans: A species on the brink

You know how national geographic and animal planet always have programs with this title? Well it turns out that like 20,000 years ago they could have made one about us. The average population of humans during the pre-Neolithic era (I don't actually know what that means, but it's before 12,000 years ago) was fucking 2,000 adults! throw in some old people and babies and we're at maybe 5,000 worldwide. Holy shit! There are many endangered species with numbers in this range. Granted that we didn't have a huge population of intelligent and selfish super-primates fucking with us. But still.

Oh, and it turns out that this fact explains why babies are adorable.