Post-Apocalypse: Back to the Stone Age

[Yorunkun]

I would like to get some feedback on a particular kind of Post-Apocalypse setting I have been thinking about. It’s nothing to do with PSI, Mutants or Mad-Max-type survival-porn. Rather, its about a primitive agrarian society reemerging after a near-total collapse of civilization. There’s a 1937 genre-text called “By the Waters of Babylon”, by Stephen Vincent Benét that captures the spirit pretty well.

This forum has had a very informative 2009 discussion on the PA genre in general. In it, Kromm amongst others, argued that society would be unlikely to still be so far in regress such a long time after the extinction event. I’m hoping we could come up with conditions that would make this plausible.

Here’s what I envision:

- A world still largely devoid of people, Tl0/1 agrarian tribes
- Our world still climatically / geographically recogniseable, but shot through with large stretches of wilderness and most past infrastructure /material culture decayed or useless
- no knowledge of society before the collapse event or the event itself in living memory; this is at least the fourth or fifth generation after X, if not more

What ultimately interests me is what kind of societies and what kinds of people such an environment would produce and how they would conceive of our present.

However, first I’d like to work out two basics:

1. What has to happen for humanity to be knocked so far back and stay there a while?

2. What modern day bits (material and information) would be gone or reclaimed in what timeframes?

Ballpark for 1 is a collapse event that winds up killing all but 0.001% of the population. I think it really needs to be that drastic for it to take us back to essentially the stone age. How do we get there? Asteroid Impact? Giant Solar Flare? Global Epedemic of unknown lethality levels?

As for 2, I’d be grateful for any deeper understanding of the factors that have a bearing on what these people have to work with. Especially I’m interested in which technologies can be easily reclaimed given at least some modern day scientific knowledge. Crackerjakk mentioned Muskets as easy to recreate weapons in the other thread; that sort of thing.

Right, thanks.