Post-Apocalypse: Back to the Stone Age

[Ulzgoroth]

We've got all this metal and all these domesticated species around. Even if we lost too much ground for, say, electricity to be of much use to us, our agriculture has some big edges that aren't going to go away easily and we've got all the scrap iron you can eat.

Originally Posted by Ji ji

In 20xx, a devastating pandemy strikes humanity. It can be a failed experiment of bacteriological world or anything you like. The disease kills everybody is infected by it. Everybody but 4 years (or less) old.
We can imagine that only a few of older survives to first months. However, there are enormous stocks of food long lasting in warehouses and shops, buildings to protect themselves (in a world with few or no predators, like USA or western Europe), cloth to cover themselves and so on, and somebody manages to survive. So, let's imagine that, over 1% of population (4 years old), only 0.1% survives to reproductive age.
70.000 kids became men and women.

Among these survivors, nobody can read. Moreover, there is a very low density. They will develop creol languages. They lack technological knowledge at all. They cannot read, ignore writing basis - for instance, phonetic value of letters - and so books are written, to them, in an unattainable code and in a stranger language, that is likely to be never discovered.
After two generations, stories about previous world are already far legends and myths. After six generations, they are a new simple religion. With the total loss of technological skills and the total impossibility to decifrate the least bit of information, they're returned to TL 0-1.
A stone age society in a world of wonders, remains of what is called "the god's era" or so on.

Yeah, I was thinking on the same lines. The only relatively plausible way to actually put humans back to the stone age would be to really annihilate our accumulated knowledge, including the brains that house it. People may not have all that much in mere biological memory, but they know enough to blow past TL1 without even trying unless you've somehow scrubbed every material trace of the old world away.

...However, I think you'd be pretty likely to exterminate the species there. 70 milion 4-year-olds worldwide have to survive to adulthood on their own and then manage to form breeding populations?