They had knowledge too, just in other areas. They would probably look down on modern humans for not knowing how to skin a deer or how to rotate crops.

I didn't mean to imply they had no knowledge, just they lacked most of the knowledge we take for granted. That knowledge itself was accumulated by many generations of people.

Many modern humans have that knowledge. It's not really inaccessible to anyone reading HN.

As long as the grid and Youtube still runs! /prepper voice off

Reading how to skin an animal and actually doing it are quite different things. Then you need to know that you need to know how to handle the skins to make anything useful with them.

Great observation, I totally agree! :)

There are still things that ancient peoples did that we have no idea how they did it (or indeed why) - my favourite example being vitrified forts, hill forts where the stone walls have been melted together by intense heat:

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

Depends on how ancient, though. Behaviorally modern humans only appear about ~50k years ago.