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That’s interesting to think about the transition from early agriculture/​pastoralism to pre-industrial society. The analyses I’ve seen focus on just recovering agriculture and/​or industry. Do you think in between could be a significant bottleneck or it would just take time? Not a peer-reviewed study, but there were some estimates of future recovery times here.
Given the results from Wand and Hoyer, I would expect it to just take time. It seems a pretty consistent pattern that many civilizations increase in complexity over time once they have adapted agriculture. Their scale-up takes around 2500 years and then plateaus. Also many of those complexity developments happened completely independently, e.g. China, the Incas and Egypt.
Executive summary: Recovering from societal collapse to modern civilization would likely take around 5000 years (range 3400-8500 years), based on historical data on transitions between major stages of development.
Key points:
Transition from hunter-gatherer to early agriculture typically took 500-2000 years, based on archaeological population data.
Early agriculture to pre-industrial society usually required about 2500 years, according to analysis of historical complexity data.
Pre-industrial to industrial society transition historically took around 500 years, though can be faster with existing knowledge.
Recovery to pre-industrial levels seems likely within a few thousand years after collapse, but further progress is uncertain.
Key uncertainties include environmental conditions, resource availability, and likelihood of reinventing crucial innovations.
Frequency of past disturbances may influence recovery speed, with modern society potentially facing slower recovery due to lack of experience.
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