[asveikau]

I don't know how it would be surprising that we could be dumber than the ancients at something. How about the dark ages? A good chunk of Europe lost touch with the accomplishments of the Roman empire. It took a long time to recover and it would not surprise me if some good ideas were never picked up again.

Or even take today's technology. We are in many ways coasting on the accomplishments of prior generations and very likely some of these would be difficult to recreate from scratch. I recall some rhetorical question: say we wanted to do it tomorrow, how much would it cost us in R&D to once again figure out how to get to the moon? Or, since most of us know tech, I can put it this way: how many folks on HN talking about js or ruby know how to write a kernel, or design a CPU, from scratch?