The wheel
A late invention, and it appears as a potter's wheel and a cart wheel almost together.
- When
- Known to
- ± 200 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Wheels appear around 3500 BCE in Mesopotamia and, nearly simultaneously, in the Carpathians and the steppe — the Bronocice pot from Poland shows a four-wheeled wagon, and actual wheels survive from Slovenian bogs. The wheel is often treated as the obvious first invention, but it is very late: it requires an axle bearing precise enough not to seize, hard tools to make it, and draught animals to pull the result. Mesoamerica invents the wheel and uses it only on toys, having nothing to harness to it.