[oliverbennett]

I still think of early human progress as this slow march forward rather than what I expect it really was - thousands of years of rediscovery and reinvention by a few million people spread far and wide. Who knows how many groups of people, and their knowledge, were wiped out through bad luck, bad judgement, or worse.

[renjimen]

The Tazmanians are a perfect example of this. They were separated from mainland Australia around 10,000 years ago by rising sea level. In that time they regressed technologically to the point where they had only 24 distinct tools compared with the several hundred available to the mainlanders.

[dilyevsky]

Reminds of this awesome talk about technology collapse, has some petty cool historical examples too - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko