Ask Lemmy

Our distant ancestors had just as much capacity for learning as we do, they just used it in different ways because that was what the nature of their daily lives demanded. Where we can recognize dozens of brands by their logo alone, they recognized plants by their leaves, useful stones, and scat. Our accumulated knowledge we pass on doesn’t make any one of us any “smarter”. Some of us alive today are not rocket scientists but have the capacity to be, just as there were people thousands of years ago that had that capacity but not the thousands of years of science and engineering that was needed to build on to take that last step and achieve it.

Solitary living is a luxury made easier by the abundance of technology we have, going it alone in a Stone Age state would be very, very difficult, then and now. Folks who understand things like tool making, agriculture, medicinal plant identification, bushcraft, animal husbandry, hunting/fishing/trap making, and clothing making would have a leg up. Those who have all that and the ability to form small cooperative groups would stand an even greater chance of success. I’d also throw out that despite the rise of digital storage, we have a lot, a lot of printed material in the world. Even if we forget how to read, there’s pictures and illustrations. Kids aren’t raised in isolation, knowledge (even diluted knowledge) gets passed on, and we wouldn’t forget where we once were, and the ruins of civilization would be all around. You’d almost need some sort of sci-fi level disease to wipe all of our minds to get us back to true Stone Age levels of living and prevent us from understanding how scavenged tools could be used. We might forget how to forge steel but we’d keep scavenging it for blades rather than revert to stone.