The logistics of the problem are most vexing. If they were distributed evenly across the world, then it would be a different problem, harder to get a civilization going. I'm afraid with no supplies and only their clothes, the result will be like the first british colony in Jamestown. Where are they? Can they find and kill a herd of cattle? 100,000 people could grab spears and form a huge circle across the landscape. Then they could walk inward and flush out whatever game was present.
It's just not that easy. We still get thwarted by sheer arithmetic and logistics. Let's be optimistic and say that a healthy person can walk sixty miles in three days without food before he becomes too weak with hunger to continue. Obviously we can't all radiate uniformly in all directions from our starting point to form a circle with a sixty-mile radius, or we'll be flushing the game ahead of us and there will be none left inside our circle.
So we walk in a straight line for twenty miles, then send half the group to the right and half to the left, to form two semicircles that close in on each other. Not back around our original position but
ahead of us, where the game hopefully hasn't been alerted to the sounds and smells of 100,000 people twenty miles away. The weakest people get to stop first and conserve their energy while the most vigorous (and this is a good deployment for those with the largest reserves of fat) walk the farthest and complete the circle. The vanguard will have walked 83 miles, creating a circle with a diameter of 40 miles and an area of 1,256 square miles.
How many game animals will we have surrounded in an area that size? Our best luck would be to land in the right place in South Dakota in 1800, and find a herd of thousands of American Bison ("buffalo") inside our circle. We'll just gloss over the fact that an entire pack of wolves can barely kill one frail elderly bison, losing several of their members in the process, and also the fact that very few of us can make or wield a spear. We'll butcher several hundred pounds of meat per animal which will feed our tribe of 100,000...
for just a few weeks. There won't be many nuts and berries to augment that carnivorous diet because huge herds of herbivores live on grassy plains, not in the forest. We'll start to suffer vitamin and mineral deficiencies very quickly. And what do we do once we've eaten all that meat? We'll never use that trick again because the neighboring bison herds will have stampeded away in panic and gotten far beyond our walking range.
Now what do we do?
Organization of the colony depends on how they are going to make a living.
You talk as if we're going to be able create something worthy of being called an "economy." Subsistence will be our
only focus, until we become adept enough at producing food that we can think beyond our aching bellies and tomorrow's breakfast. No one will be "making a living." We will all be lucky to be simply "living" at all.
If we somehow survive the first few weeks, we'll be forced to spread out as quickly as possible until the density of the population is low enough that the land will support us without agriculture. As I estimated in an earlier post, I think that means spreading our hundred thousand people across an area no smaller than Texas, so each little family group has a hunting and gathering area with sustainable animal and plant food resources for long-term survival.
Only
then will we have enough spare time and energy to concentrate on reinventing Stone Age technology. Knapped flint for firestarters and cutting tools, lean-tos for shelter, tanned hides for clothing and blankets, woven reeds for baskets.
With no surplus labor and no infrastructure, we'll be incapable of building anything but the simplest Stone Age artifacts. With no efficient travel or communication, we'll be incapable of functioning as one large community. The resources and organization necessary to jump-start the reestablishment of civilization will not exist. We'll have to rediscover agriculture and it takes several generations to cultivate and hybridize food crops from which we can reap a surplus. We'll have to capture and tame wild animals to reinvent animal husbandry. We'll have to solve the nutritional problems inherent in a diet with little variety that resulted in the adult human life expectancy falling from 53 years to 23 years after the spread of farming. Then we'll be able to build permanent settlements rather than each family roaming over its entire hunting and gathering region all year round.
At this point we will have progressed to the Neolithic Era, from which it took our ancestors about 1,500 years to build the first city.
All of the original colonists will be long dead by the time any of this happens. We hope our descendants will keep the art of reading and writing alive so they can read everything we wrote (in our spare time with no writing materials) about how to improve their lives.
If we even survive long enough to breed. We all think we're pretty savvy about survival. We can fix a flat tire, reset a circuit breaker, unclog a toilet, open a can of sardines by candlelight. Uh huh. Can any of us
recognize a source of flint? Thatch a roof? Track an animal? Turn a young tree into a shaft straight enough to use as a spear... with a flint blade?
Read
Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean Auel, one of my favorite books. She learned how to do all of these things, and then spent a winter living alone in the arctic wilderness putting that learning into practice. Then she wrote about life in the Mesolithic Era with great authority and in great detail.
I don't know about you, but I doubt that I would survive those first three days.
