I haven't watched the talk. During the Late Bronze Age Collapse, civilizations around the Mediterranean lost the ability to write! Before the Collapse, we see l

I haven't watched the talk. During the Late Bronze Age Collapse, civilizations around the Mediterranean lost the ability to write! Before the Collapse, we see lots of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian cuneiform. Afterwards, we have a period of quiet for about a century, and then Phoenician emerges and starts splitting into all of the abjads and alphabets that we see today. This is how we know, for example, that many Iron Age writings are talking about Bronze Age myths; they're written in the wrong language for their time period. We still don't know how to read Linear A; it is on the wrong side of the Collapse and we don't have a Rosetta Stone or other transitional artifact yet which includes it. It is not unreasonable that it could take us millennia to recall how to do things which we've forgotten.