Developing a world similar to our own with different nations/cultures

Would it be possible to have Homo Sapiens develop, but after that butterfly away every known culture and people on our world (no Romans, no Greeks, no Chinese, no Arabs, no Jews etc.) and still end up with a modern world that is superficially similar to our own?

I got the idea from the Stargate series. Many planets have a human population composed of kidnapped Earth humans from the Antiquity and Middle Ages, and some developed modern socieities that at first glance, could be on our own planet.

The SG-1 season 8 episode "Icon" and the season 9 episode "Ethon" for example show us a planet populated by kidnapped medieval Europeans who created a society very similar to East Germany in the 1980s.


Could we butterfly away every known OTL culture and still end up with a world like shown below in 2014, or would a modern technological culture developed like this look completely different?


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Would it be possible to have Homo Sapiens develop, but after that butterfly away every known culture and people on our world (no Romans, no Greeks, no Chinese, no Arabs, no Jews etc.) and still end up with a modern world that is superficially similar to our own?
This is a straight, no. If you take away the pillars of modern society, you will end up will a completely different way of life.

I got the idea from the Stargate series. Many planets have a human population composed of kidnapped Earth humans from the Antiquity and Middle Ages, and some developed modern socieities that at first glance, could be on our own planet.

The SG-1 season 8 episode "Icon" and the season 9 episode "Ethon" for example show us a planet populated by kidnapped medieval Europeans who created a society very similar to East Germany in the 1980s.

Could we butterfly away every known OTL culture and still end up with a world like shown below in 2014, or would a modern technological culture developed like this look completely different?

But these kidnapped medieval Europeans would still be taught things based on historical knowledge, for this to work you would need to have people, untouched by Western civilization like Native Americans, Aztecs or Australian Indigenise, secured from European contact to see what their civilization would look like.
 
Your best example would be to look at the differences between the old world and pre-columbian cultures. Even separated by 15-30k years there wasn't a huge difference and they'd even developed very similar political and religious systems. People are still people and behave similarly. As for aesthetics and technology, form mostly follows function. I doubt it would look quite so much like our 1940s but it wouldn't be totally alien.

If you were dropped into this alternate world I don't think it would be much different than the culture shock you'd get from visiting 13th century China or ancient Egypt or Tenochtitlan. It would be strange and full of cultural practices you wouldn't understand but they're still people.
 
You just need a very early POD in order to make the languages develop in a very different direction. This could of course still develop into an industrialised culture.
 
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