> The "dark ages" never happened the way it is imagined in pop-culture.

They definitely did. Books stopped being published, even the slightest deviation from the ideas of an all-powerful church and nobility would be progressively punished by censors, mutilation, or execution, and basic reasoning skills atrophied in service of weird nonsense theological arguments that make current postmodern academic culture look reasonable.

We don't know what normal people were doing, technology advanced at a snail's pace, we don't even know where many cities and towns were located. We know far more about the Romans and the Greeks than we know about some parts of Dark Age Europe. We're very lucky that some sense of religious nostalgia for the Classical age (from the fact that the Christian religion was an outgrowth of the late Roman state) kept them from losing or destroying all of the knowledge and documents of antiquity.

The Western world was saved from 1000 years of stupidity by the Protestants. It wasn't that they were geniuses, but that they thought that there was some value to the individual other than service to the imbred descendants of Roman generals. This reinvented the concepts of philosophical disagreement and intellectual productivity in Europe.

The "there was no Dark Ages" revision is from people who would love to take us back to the Dark Ages. Nostalgic for the rule of elites, unfettered by the opinions of a population kept uneducated and on the edge of starvation. People associate the slaver culture of the US South with hillbillies, but they associated themselves, with their elaborate gowns and ballrooms, with a renewal of European culture, with the slaves playing the part of the serfs.

Catholicism is the only reason we didn't reach our current level of technical and intellectual development 1000 years ago. Somehow, with their weakness, Catholics have generally become far more intellectually sound than the psychopathic libertarian elites that own us now. Their nihilism and narcissism will end up giving us another 1000 years of darkness.

We've gone from a history described entirely in terms of nobles arguing with and sleeping with each other to a present entirely described in terms of oligarchs arguing with and sleeping with each other. The last few hundred years will one day probably be described as the "Popular Period." Historians will describe it as the short span of history in which it is trivially easy to find the price of a loaf of bread, or the rules of card games. "At least 20% of the commercial writings from that period have survived."

Apocalypse no: how almost everything we thought we knew about the Maya is wrong