What would you do if our civilization regressed to the Neolithic age due to resource depletion due to global collapse?

I would be in the roughly 8 billion dead for sure.

Let’s say scientists can’t come up with solutions to global problems

We already have the solution, the French made it in the 1800. We just lack the will to use them again.

I mean…the short is answer is “die” almost certainly from unclean water, for at least 60% of the general western population.

die

Well given the extinction of more than a half million essential crop species and the previously universal knowledge of farming that occurred in the last century. Expect to die alongside billions of others.

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.

I’d become a craftsperson that’s for sure, whatever I end up doing will probably be creative manual labor of some kind - pottery for example, but not limited to. It depends on the situation wherever I’m at in the hypothetical moment.

Also, as a side hustle I’d be running something like a DnD table. I’d be on a personal quest to reconstruct the rules, I’ll be pretty much asking everyone I meet if they played, what they remember and if they’d be interested in joining my group. I believe with no Internet, tv, or radio, ttrpg would become extremely popular.

I take unbridge with the line

Level of intelligence of their distant ancestors

All evidence so far points to humans being at the same intelligence levels as they are now since basically when we first became Anatomically Modern Humans.

We were not less intelligent, we just had less information and less data.

You can be a Supergenius the likes of which only seen in comic books, but if you don’t have the right data and information, you’re no different to anyone else.

The only possible answer is that I would eek out an existence foraging for twigs and berries as a neolithic hunter gatherer. However, in my case I would only do that for several months before I died from a chronic health condition I manage with medication, so there’s that.

I don’t know if it’s really possible for us to go back to the stone age. There’s so much steel and iron lying around. I don’t really know much about metallurgy but I’m pretty sure I could figure out how to flatten some rebar into a blade if it was all I had to do all day.

We also have domesticated breeds of livestock and know how to raise crops.

So, at worst it would be some kind of modern iron age, neolithic isn’t really possible.

What would I do? Probably flee the settlements and take my chances as a swamp shaman.

Reinvent myself. Take no shit. Get a girl and be happy. Also, die at the age of 32.

Blacksmithing

mad max world is probably likely, or a 4400 type of civilization, where the rich are in thier bougie clean enclaves, while everyone is the devastate mad max style living.

I can cook over a wood fire and teach others the same. I can do carpentry with un-powered hand tools to an acceptable level. I am a pretty decent archer. Hopefully I could find a group of survivors who valued those skills over my delicious flesh.

The world can support less than 1% of its current population if everyone reverted to a neolithic lifestyle. And countless species would be hunted to extinction during the collapse.

So in short, the answer to what I would do? Like nearly everyone else, just die. The folks from Sentinel Island will inherit the Earth.

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All the people saying, “I’d just die,” remember that neolithic peoples (hell, all people up to the present day) rely on social bonds. You don’t have to possess every survival skill, just enough skills to be an asset to a community of mutual-support.

I already educate children, and regardless of society’s form I’d probably continue to do so because it’s vitally important. Also as someone well-practiced in a variety of handicrafts, I suspect I’d find my niche quite comfortably. Making useful things from limited resources, teaching others how to make such things, and teaching children the knowledge I’ve accumulated throughout my life, I think there’s bound to be a place in a stone age community for someone like me.

The level of intelligence in the Neolithic was exactly the same as today. The level of science is the difference. And the only way to go back to the Neolithic is to erase all knowledge and all memories.

pretty sure im not going to be in the survival group.

I’d probably just jerk off again tbh.

I don’t see us regressing before 1820. Will just be back to your horses, carriages, and living off the land.

So many depressed people on Lemmy, everyone just going with dying huh?

I mean I am excited to finally flex my creativity, see if there is anything I can figure out how to do with all our crap and the new world. Maybe some kind of silly The Grinch level home full of housing code violations and crazy contraptions made of garbage while I cross breed pea/beans.

It would be cool if when I die people thought of me as some weird hermit alchemist and as they wander through my house finding tools of the old world uncover a lost truth and then some YA type shit happens as a result.

Dying is easy, we all do it eventually, the question is, if you do anything before you get to the same finish line.

For all y’all on here saying you have no survival skills: computers and electronics aren’t going to just go away, and the fact that you’re having this conversation on a federated internet forum means you know at least a little bit more about computers than your average bear. For any scenario where extinction is a possibility, being able to operate a computer and use it to communicate with other humans would be a huge asset, and the more of those people we have around the easier it’ll be to keep it going when things go to hell. Don’t sell yourself short.

Oh shit, sorry honey- I have to go hunting and fishing again all week.

As we can see from what is happening in the world today my answer is nothing. We will do nothing and just accept our fate.

Return to the level of intelligence? I think we just won’t be able to sustain the sophisticated complexity of our current systems in addition to the death of skilled professionals. Honestly, my only hope is in the book I have printed called How To Invent Everything and my other books about farming, food processing and weaving, then make the technologies that we can create and sustain for the betterment of any community that I find or adopts me. Then become a cult leader idk

Well I wouldn’t have much choice in the matter. I would most definitely die.

Die.

UGG RELY ON DIVERSIFIED MUTUAL FUNDS FOR LIQUIDITY. BIG ROCK FOR SOFA.

I think that your question might be flawed on the front of intelligence. Assuming that the AI doesn’t specifically target the brightest people in the world, I don’t think that the overall intelligence of the world would go down. Besides, I don’t believe that it would be very easy to hit humanity as a whole to cause us to regress completely down there. For one, it’s likely incredibly difficult to have all the accumulated knowledge of over 10 millennia to get erased. It’s likely that the knowledge of metallurgy, chemistry, and medicine will still be floating around, be it written down, stored on a device, or a specialist having memorized it. Sure, some knowledge would absolutely get lost. But specifically the Neolithic era is where we see the beginnings of society. Agriculture was a major achievement for humanity, as it enabled us to specialize, and establish permanent settlements. There’s also another factor to consider: the ruins of our previous height will still be there. People would absolutely go and scavenge the ruins for things that we as a whole would have lost. Yes, people would absolutely die, but I don’t believe that humanity as a whole would be screwed.

Figure out how to grow food in the current climate, feed and shelter those I can, try to keep the free internet working so we can help each other out.

My survival skills aren’t great so I will surely be dead. Hope it’s a quick one

Rejoice.

Probably live in a forest

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Preach about the primitive stupidity of wasteful industrial technology and the stone age of silicon. Biology is the ultimate technology. The Neolithic is to us what we are to the age when the age of discovery is over and all of science is a fully constrained engineering corpus. This is the age of biology. At this technological stage, civilization is possible at stellar lifetimes and beyond, unlike the present where critical scarce resources are fully commercially depleted within a century. The ultimate technology is fully integrated into the elemental cycles it exists within.

The only thing holding us back is investment into discovery within a social framework of meritocratic hierarchy. Gross inherited wealth is the terminal cancer of civilizations. Intelligence is not hereditary and the impotence is incapable of managing or filtering innovation and progress. Anything beyond a trust fund for an upper middle-class lifestyle is treason against country and future.

Take for instance space exploration. All of the missions are about military engineering and have little to no basis in science altruism, or progressing the future. If anyone had even a tiny fraction of sense, we would be putting everything into the recovery of a single m-type asteroid. Any of these fragments of differentiated planetesimal cores contains more rare mineral wealth than all of what humans have accessed in the Holocene. We live on the flux, the dross, the garbage that floats to the top when gravity has pulled everything we value within this gravity prison of resource scarcity. Everything we have is the result of the sparse junk that fell to the surface later than the last phase of molten Earth; those outer objects that still contain diverse wealth. We could go right out there and pick one of our choosing. We are the Neolithic fools that never travel one valley over and discover all the resources and technology of the Han Chinese. That one objective eclipses all human wealth in a decade. Instead, we are territorial toddlers bedazzled by the colors on our toy stick’s fabric, and no better than chimpanzees mobbing to rape and pillage, with the mass mytho disorder of collective imaginary friends. The biggest businesses in our world of the present are no more that prophets selling technological singularity and infinite energy scams the same as the ancients pedaling Zeus and Apollo. There is nowhere to go down in truth; only to peek behind a façade to see nothing has changed.