The key foundations of human intelligence and ingenuity will always remains regardless of whether or not fossil fuels exist for us to exploit. Non-renewable resources only served to speed up our industrialization.
No, it doesn't. Only knowledge that people consider to have value will be retained over time. Many things are lost to history, for example.. nobody knows how to make cobblestone. (Or so I'm told)
Somehow the cobblestones managed to look both randomly placed and have some "lines" that gave it a very orderly look. The cobblestones were placed in some substrate that allowed moss to grow between them.
At some point about 10 years ago, the city decided to tear up a giant trench in the middle of the street to replace some sewage. When they were done, they covered the trench with concrete and then re-placed the stones they had removed onto the concrete.
It looks nothing like it used to. Just messy. I think that if someone who didn't grow up there were to see it, they would think it was a perfectly charming street, but really it lost so, so much.
I asked around and apparently nobody knows how to lay cobblestones anymore. There was a certain art to how they were placed and the substrate selected: dirt, then sand (what kind? how coarse?) then stones, then something else. This ensured that they would never wash away even in the torrential rains we get here every year.
Placing cobblestones seems like an easy thing to do. Just rocks on dirt, right? But how do you ensure they never move, they never wash away, they don't get covered in dirt or greenery.
The craziest thing is that the street had remained basically pristine for what was probably 100+ years, but the new stones on concrete are already falling out.
This is regional. I went to a talk on cobblestone streets in New York. There are entire books dedicated to the craft, and new scholarship on it ongoing. (It pertains closely to the question of prefabricated infrastructure.)
IIRC, they found that limes (or lemons) would prevent scurvy on long voyages; then the ships got faster AND the switched to a citrus fruit lemons (or limes) that didn't have enough vitamin C to prevent scurvy, but they didn't realize it because the faster voyages didn't allow enough time for scurvy to develop; then on some longer voyages sailors did develop scurvy despite eating the citrus fruit, so the Navy erroneously concluded that citrus fruit didn't cure scurvy after all.
Even modern technology can be lost. Look inside any company with a lackluster documentation culture to see this in action on a small scale.
Even NASA had to spent considerable time re-discovering how the Saturn 5 was put together.
Edit - I think I meant this as a reply to the GP, but I'll leave it here.
Granted, we've recently (mostly) rediscovered how to make those, but it shows knowledge accumulation isn't monotonic.
As for Roman concrete, the Romans were blessed with some really nice volcanic ash, but we can build things out of concrete that the Romans never could thanks to rebar alone.
Can you expand on that? I didn't think cobblestones were made? Don't you just pick suitable stones?
An example that comes to mind is a brick townhouse nearby that was struck by a car and part of a structural brick rounded wall collapsed. It remained that way for many years because the owner simply couldn't find a mason that knew how to rebuild it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sett_(paving)
(which is often called a cobblestone)
Edit: Still being laid in Edinburgh...
I had assumed you meant that the stone had been manufactured into a block, but this is clearly something else.
Some kind of special concrete formulation do you think?
The formula kept as a trade secret, then lost when the company closed or got bought or something I suppose?
Rather unfortunate, alas.
Edited