This is what I’ve sometimes seen claimed online.
I don’t know the history of language (or wheels) down there, but one counterpoint is Ethiopia is part of this region and has had a writing system since the BC times.
Before Europeans… what? Before Europeans had them? Before Europeans colonized sub-Sahara Africa? Something else?
You’re going to define what you mean by “before Europeans.” Do you mean before major European contact by sea starting in the 1400s or so?
Ge’ezwas a script used in Ethiopia starting in the 8th-9th Century BC.
I would note that Europeans did not have written languages before North Africans (Egyptians) and Asians.
And of course in the Western Africa, the arabic script was adopted to write in the sahel the local languages (when the arabic language was not itself used).
The wheel is a more complex invention than it seems. To be useful, it requires not only a wheel but also an axle, which to work properly needs a degree of precision working. You also have to have domestic animals, roads, and the need to transport heavy goods to make wheels worthwhile.
The wheel seems to have been invented once, in either Mesopotamia or the Eurasian steppes, and soon spread across Eurasia. So Europeans again did not have the wheel before Asians.
However, although the wheel was known in sub-Saharan Africa, it never really caught on there. Oddly, the wheel was not used in the pre-Columbian Americas either, although they were aware of the concept, it being used in toys.
Like you said - it needs draft animals to really increase it’s usefulness. No horses or oxen or donkeys in the Americas. There were llamas, but they aren’t suited. Bison never got domesticated. Are there any animals you can think of that would be “missed opportunities” in that regard?
That is not accurate, a wheel barrel is a big help over no wheel barrel. Sounds like you picked up that tidbit in a book like Guns, Germs, and Steel
You mean a wheel barrow. But those aren’t an obvious invention. It’s not like someone invented a wheel and then said “what can we do with this?” The wheel and axle were basically an extension of using logs as rollers under a heavy object. Someone wondered “how can we keep these rollers in place so we don’t have to keep resetting them?” Apparently there was only one place where they came up with a solution to this problem. But going from there to a wheel barrow is not trivial.
People in the Americas were using sledges I believe before Europeans arrived. The step of adding the wheel to a a-frame style sledge is fairly obvious and then the idea of trying to push it instead of pulling is the proto-wheel barrow. Even a wheeled sledge is a big step up from hauling it by sledge.
Fairly obvious? Why do you think so? What other cultures produced a wheel barrow before they produced other axled vehicles? A lot of things look easy to imagine, having been imagined already.
What? What do you think the first wheeled tools looked like? Do we have some reason to believe that 2 and 4 wheels carts came before a 1 wheeled contraption?
I’m dismissing the tired excuse that the lack of pack animals was why wheeled carts were invented in the Americas. If you come up with a wheel concept, any wheeled cart/barrow is a help over not having it.
When I was younger, I carried stuff on my back when going on long walking trips. I could have used a wheel barrow. It’s not unknown. You see travellers using them sometimes /when traveling on made roads/.
I’m amused by the implication that I used a backback because I was too dumb to use a hand cart.
some centuries of the archaelogical evidence.
it is an assertion.
the disappearance of the wheeled cart in the middle east in favor of the pack animals due to better efficiency it appears - sans the roads networks - is evidence that the assertion of the blanket advantage of the wheels can not be made. It must be proven.
I meant before the 1800s, when they first colonized the continent.
OK, that helps. But first, just realize that sub-Sahara Africa was colonized by Europe long before the 1800s. The Age of Discovery was kicked off by Portuguese explorers sailing down to Africa in the 1400s. It’s true that there was massive colonization in the 1800s, but Portuguese, Dutch and other explorers were setting up trading posts in the 1500s and 1600s, even if those might not have compared to the later colonization efforts. Certainly there would have been enough contact for what your question is about.
As noted, though, Arab traders had been plying the Eastern parts of Africa for a long time before that, and they were arguably more technically advanced than the Europeans at the time. That led to exposure to things like the wheel and Arabic script before the Europeans came along. Not to mention the indigenous script already noted by Colibri.
I don’t know about wheels, but Ethiopia had its own indigenous writing system by about 500 years before Christ. The Islamized and Islamic-influenced portions of Africa (most of West Africa and parts of East Africa) were literate during the middle ages and used Arabic script.
It’s true that Arabic script wasn’t an indigenous invention, but neither was the Latin or Greek scripts in northern Europe. A couple indigenous African scripts were invented in the 18th-20th centuries, but they didn’t really take off because by then people already had access to both Latin and Arabic writing systems.
Isn’t Egyptian an indigenous African script? And don’t all the Semitic and Latin scripts described trace back to it?
Maybe not sub-Saharan enough, but at that point the cat was out of the bag. It’s not like writing was completely independently invented from scratch dozens of times.
Yes
The North American natives, particularly the nomads of the plains, used what I believe was called a “travois”. their beasts of burden - dogs and women - would haul a long triangular setup, using the same sort of poles as used for their teepees. The load was tied to the cross-pieces and the effort was a lot less than carrying, on relatively flat land like the great plains. I suppose over irregular ground, dragging a pole was easier than building and maintain wheels and not a lot more effort. So - no great need for wheels, and no a lot of good tools for fancy woodwork.
Which brings up another issue - creating devices like carts requires fancy woodwork. Look at the chariot found in King Tut’s tomb - easy to find on Google. It was designed to be fast and light - and carry only one or two people, driver and shooter. The level of woodwork suggests that only someone with a lot of time on their hands and a need for speed would spend the resources to make one. Even the traditional “wheels made of planks” primitive cart would require some significant woodwork skills and time investment. As mentioned with the travois - this only makes sense when the cart itself is a real timesaver. Anyone who’s used a wheelbarrow, for example, must realize it’s great over short distances but not really effective for long distance travel. Plus, pushing it requires pretty solid ground; pulling is more effective. If you’re pulling, two wheels is more stable. But again, with hard (wood) wheels, you need pretty solid ground. Sand or mud probably not too useful.
War chariots got past this by (a) using horse power and (b) being light (and © wider wheels). But human-powered carts would only be useful for loads too heavy to carry, which means you really do need good hard paths. For long distance caravans, even the places that knew of wheels tended to just load up camels or horses instead.
I suspect the lack of wheel use was more the environment than the lack of knowledge. Arab caravans (and Islam) spread all over the north-middle of Africa, so it’s not like nobody knew the concept by the middle ages - and more likely well before that.