This reminds me of the so-called "dark ages". Bronze age collapse, Middle ages… Early historians used to call them dark because of just such "limited evidence"

This reminds me of the so-called "dark ages". Bronze age collapse, Middle ages… Early historians used to call them dark because of just such "limited evidence". Little surviving records, compared to the periods before/after. But these "periods of silence" may have given us something less tangible but even more lasting than literature and architecture. The fabric of societies was rewoven, new modes of thinking and organization emerged from the chaos. People may not have been into books and stone, but they were certainly not idle! The inhales and exhales at the scale of humanity are sometimes hard to appreciate, or even tell apart, from our individual level.