[Serious] The Post-Technological World.

[Yonadav]

I don't think hunting will be as important as farming, simply because we're better at farming. The "all natural" farmers will be at a premium. This will be in countries where lo-techs already do that.

Whether hunting or farming dominates depends on the extent to which population collapses.  

Post technological farming society requires a global population collapse of maybe 90% from its current technological level.  Post technological hunting society requires a global population collapse of maybe 99%.

Without widespread post 1900 transportation and irrigation infrastructure, or pesticide and synthetic fertilizer technology, but with still reasonable stable and peaceful social order, farming might support 1 billion people world wide, tops.  Towns can still be numerous, and Cities of up to ~1 million would still be possible, long distance trade can still be voluminous, and reemergence of technological society within a couple of centuries still has a shot.

But hunt might only support a few tens of millions world wide tops.  Periodic gatherings of at most a few thousand people would be the apex of social and economic exchange.  Long distance trade will be for token goods only.  We will be tens of centuries of reemergence of technology as we know it, if at all.

The key element that is missing in this discussion is what causes the collapse. Without that information, we can't really say anything about how far technology would be reduced and how many people can be supported. I can't imagine anything causing a collapse of 90%, short of a nuclear war or meteor impact. Or weaponized prions. The things that would be so cataclysmic that our society would collapse to such an extent would also change nature, and what we do to survive and how many can survive to a pretty unknowable extent. Maybe no one can survive a collapse from those things.

A long period collapse has to be either from a cataclysmic event that makes both farming and hunting highly problematic, since the game has died off, the ground is poisoned, or the climate won't support agriculture; or it has to be from us running out of some resource that we need to sustain techology. I don't know what resource we will run out of.

If we don't run out of a resource, and the ground is fertile, the climate allows agriculture, and animals are healthy, I think that we would rebound quite rapidly. What's going to cause our society to collapse so severely if we have fertile ground, a climate that permits ag, and healthy animals? A solar flare? That could cause massive technological failure, but we would likely rebound from that pretty quickly.