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Why Did It Take So Long To Invent the Wheel?
Hugh Pickens writes "Wheels are the archetype of a primitive, caveman-level technology, and we tend to think that inventing the wheel was the number one item on man's to-do list after learning to walk upright. But LiveScience reports that it took until the bronze age (3500 BC), when humans were already casting metal alloys and constructing canals and sailboats, for someone to invent the wheel-and-axle, a task so challenging archaeologists say it probably happened only once, in one place. The tricky thing about the wheel isn't a cylinder rolling on its edge, but figuring out how to connect a stable, stationary platform to that cylinder. 'The stroke of brilliance was the wheel-and-axle concept,' says David Anthony, author of The Horse, the Wheel, and Language. To make a fixed axle with revolving wheels, the ends of the axle have to be nearly perfectly smooth and round, as did the holes in the center of the wheels. The axles have to fit snugly inside the wheels' holes, but not too snug, or there will be too much friction for the wheels to turn. But the real reason it took so long is that whoever invented the wheel would have needed metal tools to chisel fine-fitted holes and axles. 'It was the carpentry that probably delayed the invention until 3500 BC or so, because it was only after about 4000 BC that cast copper chisels and gouges became common in the Near East.'"
you also don't need metal tools to create a round hole. Rotate a rock in the hole and before long, you have a perfectly round hole.
How to make the axle? Same principle, but rotate it in a hole in a rock. No, the hole doesn't have to be round, the rotation will cause the rotated object to be round. You don't even need a hole - a wedge will do.
No rocks? No problem. Rotate a wooden peg in a hole while pouring sand on it, and you create a round hole and a round peg at the same time. The people who invented fire were almost certainly familiar with this effect.
I think the real reason the wheel became popular so late wasn't that it wasn't invented, but because there were no roads to use them on. Wheels aren't too useful on a forest trail, flood plain, sand dune or stairs. You need a relatively flat, wide and hard surface. When we started living in towns, and traded between them, we also got roads that wheels could be useful on.
This strikes me as very likely. I work on legged robotic systems and one of the mantras is 'legs are better than wheels'. Pack animals are much better suited to transporting goods over rough terrain than wheeled vehicles, especially if the wheeled vehicles don't have something like an ICE or battery. Even if you don't have a inorganic power source, on the wrong terrain a primitive wheeled vehicle is probably more of a burden to a pack animal than just putting the material you want to haul on it. Not to mention that if you don't have pack animals your power source (i.e. humans) is even worse suited to the task. In the absence of modern roads, etc. most of the places people would want to live, hunt and move between are the 'wrong terrain'.
Moreover there is a lower hanging technological fruit, boats. Food is already concentrated on the river so why wouldn't you take advantage of natures highways before bothering to work out how to build vehicles to go on your own.
While there are other uses for 'wheels' such as grindstones and turntables, the thing we traditionally think of as a wheel is, in most parts of the world where ancient peoples lived, useless without infrastructure. A sled is much better if it snows, or if it is flat but tends to get muddy.A boat is better if you have a river. A pack or a pack animal if the terrain is uneven.
More likely they simply had a much better invention...slaves. Same reason why all the basics were there to make steam power during the height of the Greek and Roman empires but it was only used to make parlor tricks and toys for the tables of the rich. When you have slaves to do the toting for you why bother? I wouldn't be surprised if that is why so many of our earliest leaps of technology came from desert lands like Syria and Egypt, lots of desert plus nomadic tribes equals less chance to capture slaves and a lot more work to feed the ones you have.
To me the more interesting question is 'How many times have we had to reinvent things?' because we see all these dark periods where some religion, or some plague or other disaster comes along and we end up taking these huge stumbles backwards that take centuries to recover from. for example we know now that during the height of the Roman empire they had VERY advanced mathematics, used gold sutures to help prevent infection (even if they didn't know why it worked), used lithium in the form of baths to treat the mentally ill, even had taxis that charged by the mile. Then came the rise of the Christians who promptly destroyed anything that didn't have the word Jesus on it and we were sent backwards by centuries. Not knocking the Christians as it seemed like every religion did the same thing, hell we see the Muslims trying their damnedest to do the same even today.
hell I wouldn't be surprised if the first couple of guys that came up with the wheel weren't promptly strapped to it and set on fire for being witches, would be about right considering here we are in the 21st century and we still have people killing each other over what some goat herder wrote on a piece of sheep's ass 1000+ years ago.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I hunt. I also live on the edge of the Mark Twain Forest. You cannot pull a cart through the Mark Twain Forest and it ain't laws that stop you, it's trees. And no, those "paths to the forest" weren't and aren't smooth. Ruts. Smooth is totally modern. Not even roads in the US were smooth until after WWII. Read up.
"I am guessing you never hunted. you drive to where you hunt, walk around and kill things, drag them to your cart, load up the bodies and then drive home."
One, that's not hunting for a living, that's recreation. The giveaway is the "drive to" you mentioned.
Now, when Ugh and Arrgh hunted, they walked. They also walked ***all the way home*** instead of back to their car.
"When they could not bring 40 slaves to carry all the dead animals, they needed a cart. plus you did not go on a 1 week hunting trip with just your pointy stick."
Because all primitive hunter/gatherers were slave holders? No. You have no clue as to primitive life. U and A were also in far better shape than you and porting a 150lb carcass wasn't all that much.