Could it be possible for human to regress back to the Stone Age? If for some reason all human knowledge in the form of books and the internet, and all modern day technology was lost could humanity revert back to using Stone tools and etc? Or is that impossible?
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Not without affecting human thought. We build. We create. Take away the text books, etc., and we'll just create more. You would need to have a disease or drug that affected people so they couldn't concentrate or could no longer comprehend complex things. After a few generations you'd be back to the stone age. But it would take centuries for all the gizmos and tools to rust/degrade/fade away. – JBH Dec 12 '17 at 02:26
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6This seems to be a duplicate of the "bombed back to the Stone Age" question. But the answer is no, because a) evolution doesn't have a direction, so it can't go backwards; b) evolution takes many generations; c) making stone tools is not easy, so why would anyone do it when they have lots of metal laying around? – jamesqf Dec 12 '17 at 02:44
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@jamesqf you have a link? If this is a duplicate we can flag it as such – James Dec 12 '17 at 07:09
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@James I think it's this one: https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/99839/could-humanity-be-blown-back-into-the-stone-age – F1Krazy Dec 12 '17 at 09:00
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It’s nit a duplicate – Jayden Harris Dec 12 '17 at 12:33
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4@JaydenHarris Could you explain why not? – F1Krazy Dec 12 '17 at 13:43
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The other question specifies a nuclear war as the catalyst for stone age reversion, this does not. – rek Dec 12 '17 at 19:38
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Can humanity revert to using stone age tools? Sure. It is not even very difficult to arrange. The vast majority of our technological knowledge is stored either digitally or on paper. Both of these storage mechanisms have limited lifespans. Furthermore, none of our knowledge is stored in naturally understandable form. A few challenging generations during which acquiring food and shelter trumps teaching the children to read, then all that ink covered paper is good for is starting cook fires.
As for any of this involving evolution, the answer is no. Our accumulated knowledge and our current genetics are two separate and distinct treasures. We can loose our knowledge pretty easily, but our genetic code is a little more resistant to change.
...at least until the gene therapists get too ambitious; then all bets are off.
Henry Taylor
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While this answer doesn't explicitly point this out, the question is a knowledge / technology question, not an intelligence question. As such, evolution doesn't even play a role in the regression of a society to previous levels of technology. Current human civilisation is far more fragile than most people think and the role that specialisation now fills puts quite a few 'single points of failure' into the local recovery process. – Tim B II Dec 12 '17 at 02:51
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@TimB I agree. Plus I edited out evolution in the title. This question confuses material and intellectual progress with evolution. Considering the term 'evolution' is becoming so abused to almost lose its original meaning this shouldn't be a surprise. Damned annoyed though that be. – a4android Dec 12 '17 at 04:59
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Yes, but only with some help.
There are a few viruses known to reduce cognitive ability: herpes simplex type 1; chlorovirus ATCV-1, a virus transmissable to humans from algae and capable of reducing cognitive performance by 10% vs. uninfected; and of course zika virus, which is associated with an autoimmune condition that attacks brain cells in adults and causes microcephaly in babies.
It's conceivable that a virus evolving/engineered along this direction that somehow benefits from really dumbing us down could become endemic within homo sapiens sapiens.
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1The problem with this is that you assume that Stone Age tools &c are a consequence of limited cognition rather than the accumulation of technology - Newton's "shoulders of giants" thing. They're not: you know that a stone knife or arrowhead is possible, can you go make one? It'd be a lot more work to re-invent Stone Age tech than to adapt the remains of modern tech to new circumstances. – jamesqf Dec 12 '17 at 18:22
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@jamesqf That may factor as well, but brain size did double between the advent of hominid toolmaking and the modern age so it's reasonable to conclude cognition similarly evolved. Hundreds of thousands of years also passed between significant advances, which is hard to explain if they were just as capable as us of improving on what came before. – rek Dec 12 '17 at 19:45
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Well, that depends on just where in the "Stone Age" you're looking. At one end of the range you could have an ape picking up a rock to break open nuts. I'm thinking of the more complex flaked and ground tools of the late Paleolithic and Neolithic. As to significant tool advances, there really isn't room for that much advance (though the Incas and Aztecs did quite well). You really need the random accident that's the discovery of metal, while modern humans would have plenty of metal handy for salvage, some of which would last for many generations. – jamesqf Dec 13 '17 at 03:51
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for some reason all human knowledge in the form of books and the internet, and all modern day technology was lost could
I am assuming the previous lines to be true.
When a present day teenager whispers sweet words to his/her significant other on the other side of the phone, has no clue about Shannon's theory, Fourier's transforms and all other technologies and sciences enabling that talk.
I think most if not all of us are in the same situation: we use things without barely knowing how they work, we only trust that they will do. Some of us may have deeper knowledge on one field, but on some other we are nothing more than the teenager mentioned above. Just as examples:
- A skilled craftsman may be able to build a table, but has no idea where to get the wood.
- An IC designer can try to design a microprocessor (assuming it can be done without computers), but has no clue on how to physically realize it (and where such a factory might be) and where to find and process the suitable materials
So, once you manage to remove all the knowledge from the world, it will quickly sink back to stone age. The luckiest of us will be able to light a fire with a stick and/or a stone, maybe hunt down some wild animal or harvest fruits where they grow (good luck harvesting mangoes in Denmark...).
The first wave survivors may tell stories about smartphones, smart TVs, cars, airplanes, rockets, computers and atomic bombs, but all of these stories will quickly fade into legends and myths for the second generation, since they never saw one and none of the first generation was really able to explain in details how they worked.
L.Dutch
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