[benjaminl]

The YouTube show How to Make Everything. Did this. They started the tech tree from the very beginning by making simple hand stone tools and then building up tool by tool to more sophisticated technologies.

If all you have is a hand. Even getting the wood to make a handle for your axe is hard.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLXfVEsLI-qRC_MAQZcVxpjtF...

[perl4ever]

Seems to me like a lot of the difficulty would be that the natural resources you need, in the absence of civilization, are scattered all over the planet, let alone deep underground.

I vaguely remember reading something about how even in the earliest days of making flint arrowheads, there were massive centralized mines that archaeologists have found. It wasn't like just because you were in the stone age chipping rocks, every location was equally accessible to the resources you needed. Similar to now, where you need a particular type of sand for concrete, or for fracking, or...

[monocasa]

Interestingly there's technologies we might not be able to replicate if needed, as we've mined out the purest resources that we know of.

Particularly nuclear technology, since so much early experimentation was dependent on ores like from the Shinkolobwe mine in Congo with 65% uranium. These days finding ore with 1% uranium is considered a good find.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkolobwe

Maybe our nuclear waste will fill the same niche in a post apocalyptic reconstruction of society?