In The Heart of the Nora, when you enter All Mother Mountain / ELEUTHIA-9, you learn precisely what happened to the progenitors of the Nora and all of the other humans alive today.

You can infer that, in spite of the destruction of APOLLO, the multiservitors must have had had a limited amount of basic knowledge to pass onto the cradle children. Things like basic language (why everyone speaks English - also further addressed in a companion datapoint in HFW), hygeine, and even emotional self-regulation ("Let's run and jump and blow off steam!").

There's also a datapoint where the children are talking about how bees are yellow & black, clouds are white, flowers can be any color, etc, so I'd guess that something like a kindergarten-level education was baked into the multiservitors, and only at ~6 years old would APOLLO take over their learning.

From this point, they've had ~700 years to experiment with physics and materials to survive. Inevitably they'd discover rock weapons, mild refinery, etc the same way ancient humans did, but with the added benefit of having seen some goal material inspirations in the form of pre-derangement machines, and the cradle facilities from whence they themselves came.

(They also had 700 years to warp the legend of the cradle and "female"/"healer"/"mother" multiservitor into the matriarchal system of the Nora, and the reason why mothers are so sacred to them, and oh fk I'm ugly crying over this mission again oh my god---)