Best summary of the state of technology
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Changes in intelligence can only be caused via genetic shifts, and changes in general behavior like incest, severe malnourishment, domestic violence.
The latter two were way more prevalent in the past, so that increased average intelligence somewhat. For a genetic shift it requires people with higher intelligence to reproduce more than those with lower, or for women to prefer more intelligent men over less intelligent men. A change like this can span thousands of years or even orders of magnitude more. Note that intelligence correlates very highly with skin color, which in turn correlates with the environment inhabited by populations across large spans of times. So it suggests that a population's intelligence can change roughly as fast as skin color would.
But we are not talking about massive changes. In IQ, the difference is probably around ~5. People were simply less educated and more busy working and living hard.
If I'd live somewhere around 500-1000 years ago, I'd probably be a common peasant with no way to channel my potential. Drawing? No paper. Reading? Not much to read, although I'd pursue it as well as I can. Writing? A hobby at best, almost impossible to make a living out of it. With luck I could get into a city and do some "higher level" job, become a priest or a craftsman.