Was this somehow inspired by the BSG finale?

However, I find this kind of question fascinating. This question is posited in the book Marrow, and it takes a very advanced society about 5000 years to get back to where they were.

I think the situation right away would work more or less like this. Within the first few weeks to months, nasty. We're literally talking about BILLIONS of people that will starve to death within a matter of several months.

Based on your scenario, we're not looking at instantly restored nature. Vast areas of the world would suddenly be large, vacant, barren land where the cities were. Places that were verdant farm land before being paved over by roads, cities, and suburbs are likely to be nutrient starved and unfarmable for many years.

You would immediately have millions of people moving out into surviving "wilderness" areas. Trees burning, wild animals being hunted for food. I'm mainly thinking of the U.S., but the ideas apply to most other industrialized countries. "Third world" and agrarian societies might actually fair better. We're talking about the utter decimation of many remaining "protected" species. Suddenly removing everything humans have built, at this point in history, would seriously fuck what's left of nature on the land. On the other hand, humans would no longer have immediate access to the deep ocean. Given the results of ocean recovery in protected areas in recent years, its encouraging to think that many threatened and endangered species and ecosystems would immediately start recovering.

The next important thing to take into account is culture and religion. There will likely be surviving populations worldwide that represent the varieties of cultures and religions that we already have. In small pockets, you might find members of the intelligentsia trying to recreate primitive paper as soon as possible, to re-record as much general knowledge as they can. In other parts of the world, particularly the Muslim populations, there will be a religious fervor and general destruction of any remaining advanced knowledge. This will also happen in much of America, due to our retarded Evangelican populations. We might actually find more preservation efforts in Europe and Japan, due to their longer-term cultural histories mixed with being extremely modern. I can't say about China, but they have a long history and might also work to preserve knowledge.

People are adaptable, and anything short of a global disaster that fucks the basic life processes of the world, people will survive. It would likely take several hundred years at a minimum, and at most several thousand, before we saw some resemblance of modern technology re-emerging.

However, the only cultural artifacts that people would have is what was created from the morning after, onward. There would be no Pyramids, Stonehenge, Jerusalem, Aztec ruins, or anything. No cave paintings, primitive burials, etc. By saying "all technology", this means that all physical remains of our progress would need to disappear too. We would only be left with our memories. In every graveyard around the world, all caskets would disappear. All pacemakers and artificial joints would be gone from the skeletons. They would also be gone from the living.

After a couple of generations without any physical remnants of our civilization's evolution, with no pre-history, our descendants would be completely cut off from their past. They would of course be able to re-learn about evolution over the billions of years of life because fossils won't go anywhere. They could relearn about our own evolution, but only from the biology side of things.

I would imagine that future historians would eventually realize their legends of an ancient global civilization might have some credence, even though there is no physical evidence. There would be the tell-tale signs, the footprint, that our technology had even though the tech itself is gone. There would be the atmospheric carbon levels, the concentrations of uranium where reactors and weapons were, and hundreds of other alterations to the physical world that we've made.