Even when the entire Mediterranean Bronze age civilization collapsed catastrophically with people starving to death, cities burning, widespread brutal and chaot

Even when the entire Mediterranean Bronze age civilization collapsed catastrophically with people starving to death, cities burning, widespread brutal and chaotic warfare, and obliteration of conventional social structures the civilizations still bounced back in a few centuries, sometimes in less than a single century. And that's without widespread literacy and widespread availability of printed knowledge (as we have today). Yet out of the ashes of those civilizations the Iron age arose, and an unprecedented flourishing of scientific inquiry occurred in greece, egypt, and elsewhere. All of that without a previous roadmap of knowledge, and struggling to rebuild the shattered pieces of civilization. Rebuilding civilization from a more modern collapse would almost certainly transpire differently. For one modern subsistence crops are superior to those of the Mediterranean bronze age. We have potatoes, corn, yams, high yield wheat and hybrids (like triticale), etc. We also know better techniques for farming like use of cover crops, crop rotation, etc. Some aspects of modern, industrialized civilization are tenuous (like worldwide inter-continental freight shipping), others are simply insights or knowledge gained through hard work that doesn't need to be repeated. Such as even the general idea of the movable type printing press, or literacy, or the germ theory of disease, or food preservation via canning, and so on. A modern person with a little bit of knowledge transported back 2 or even 3 thousand years could change the way people live their lives at a fundamental level. Boiling water and pasteurizing milk before drinking it are things that have been possible since antiquity. As would be canning of various foods, enabling preservation of fruits, vegetables, and meats harvested in the summer through the winter or through several years. That sort of thing transforms the basic subsistence equation enormously and massively accelerates the amount of time it would take to return to some degree of modernity and industrialization. Not to mention the huge transformation due merely to the ideas of rewarding individuals for their labor and their inventions, the idea of the scientific method, and the process of advancing knowledge and technology in general. All of which were stunted historically because people didn't know any better, just as people didn't know to wash their hands or boil their water.