Someone asked this question on Reddit. Below is my response, where I quote and answer each of their questions.

Would a person somehow brought to the present from, for example, ancient Egypt be able to develop skills that are accessible to modern humans? Skills like driving a car at high speeds; typing 60 WPM; writing complex computer code; etc. Skills, the nature of which, would have no purpose 5000 years ago.

Yes.

If they could, why?

Creativity: the ability to create new knowledge. Creativity is a property of software (David Deutsch). Once the brain has the requisite software, it need not evolve any further physically. (It may have, but that doesn’t matter.) Humans became creative hundreds of thousands of years ago, so an ancient Egyptian would be well within the cut-off point.

Why would the brain have evolved to be able to learn to do things that were in fact millennia to come?

Because creativity lets people learn new things, which is extremely useful. It has what Deutsch calls reach. And it took the onus off genes to pre-install ~all knowledge from birth. And it meant that people could make up for certain otherwise deleterious genetic mutations: eg if an otherwise pre-installed ability to walk mutates and breaks, then people can still learn to walk. That’s a big deal from an evolutionary perspective. I recently wrote about this topic in more detail: Why Do Humans Have Fewer Genes than Flies?

And would that imply that there are likely skills we cannot even imagined [sic] existing, that we are capable of?

Yes. People can invent new fields and skills. By definition, that means we have not imagined them yet.

It may seem counterintuitive, but to understand people and their abilities better, your best bet is to focus less on hardware (the brain) and more on software.