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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Rationality Quotes: November 2010 - Less Wrong
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But they wouldn't rediscover the mythic overlay, which is what makes the original quote a lie and an attempt to steal credit.
There seems to be an interesting factual question lurking here: how much of the mythic overlay would people reinvent in a similar form, even if they forgot all their language and culture? A quick search turned up the amazing Wikipedia page List of thunder gods. Of course, the major monotheistic religions are also very similar to each other (I'd say about as close as C# was to Java when it first appeared), but they didn't arise in ignorance of each other, as pagan mythologies did.
The various LISPs may also be a good analogy.
I was thinking the same. My understanding is that neopaganism is more about the general process with which people come up with mythic significance for natural phenomena than any specific pagan myth. There certainly seems to be a case for humans doing that spontaneously in a state of nature, though it's hard to tell exactly how wide the variation would be.
The closest the human universals list has are "belief in supernatural/religion" and "weather control (attempts to)". So everyone ends up trying to magic up nature into doing stuff, but they're not necessarily reverent about it like the neopagans would like?