I'm not saying that humans are smarter in a generally useful sense now than they were 500 years ago. Especially at the median, where what most people know isn't how things work but what they need to do to make things work within their environment.

Take your average man or woman off the street today and drop them into 1500s Europe, in all likelihood they'd be unable to function.

Now, an engineer (or a Connecticut Yankee) with both a specific understanding of materials science, a knowledge of history sufficient to know the broad outlines of circumstances in the past, and where the gold (or more importantly: coal and oil) are buried, might be able to accomplish some interesting things. If he could convince someone to go along with his proposals.

But that's not my point.

It's that you could pretty much take a European from 1500 and from 1750 and have them swap places. Most of the general nature of day-to-day life would remain largely similar. There were very few significant changes (among the biggest would have been in how business and banking were organized, as financial systems were developing over this period).

Socially and culturally there may have been a few bigger differences. Martin Luther posted his 95 Thesis in 1517, and the changes that this triggered in the Church would likely have dwarfed much else.

And really, you could move another 500 or 1000 years backward and you'd see some incremental change, but nothing at all like the past 250 years.

But again, 1750 -> 1500 is going to be a hugely different change than 1750 -> 2000.

Thanks to the Flynn effect, it is likely that most of us would be significantly better at abstract thought than the average person 500 years ago. Thanks to diet, we'd also mostly be out of shape giants.

We would, however, be sorely lacking on basic survival skills. Also, not knowing Latin would mark us as uneducated and not worth listening to.

I don't disagree with anyone here. It had occurred to me that communication would be difficult (I don't think impossible). Mostly I thought the survival skills is what would be learned and then you'd be just like everyone else trying to survive. Maybe some of the knowledge could make it a bit better (locally) but a lot of what we know is really built on things that would be out of reach.

What someone said about geologists and knowing where resources are hadn't even crossed my mind. I was thinking more of a general high school graduate. Anyone with a specialty (math related especially) might do better (again I assume coping and not freaking out or getting a disease immediately).