Of which there is a great deal of in Africa.
Your experience with African terrain would be … ?
The entirety of subsaharan Africa looks like the Serengeti.
How could you not know this???
/s
Whatever the relative virtues of the wheel as a mode of transport, the potter’s wheel would be useful everywhere that people made pottery.
The potter’s wheel was known in ancient Egypt:
Allegedly, it’s use in sub-Saharan Africa was “rare” as hand-building was preferred, but I’ve found no source that dates its introduction there.
Allegedly, the Maya did not use potter’s wheels:
But they did use a k’abal:
“While it is certainly true that the Maya did not possess the potter’s wheel, they did make use of a device called the k’abal. This was a wooden disk that rested on a smooth board between the potter’s feet. Spun by feet, the k’abal was not unlike the potter’s wheel that had been in use in the Old World for over five thousand years.”
Possible conclusion: despite the argument in the above article, it wasn’t the difficult terrain or lack of animals that prevented the use of the wheel (as neither would impact the use of the potter’s wheel). Rather, it was the difficulty inherent in making the thing in the first place - mainly, in making an axle that worked.
This is the conclusion in Scientific American as to why inventing the wheel took so long:
The k’abal is, basically, a potter’s wheel without an axle. It stands to reason that the axle would be the “hard part” to get right.
One thing to keep in mind is that the wheel is not only useful for transportation, but it is hugely helpful in moving water around and powering machines. The water wheel and the windmill would probably not exist without “the wheel (with an axle)” having been invented first.
But in areas where there is nothing much to carry in a wheelbarrow.
For India, thats true in the South and the East, but not so much in the North.
Africa had lots of horses…
You get the saddle, I’ll hold your beer for you, far, far away from it.
Naah, not a saddle. I’m a gentlebeing.I use a four-in-hand carriage.
Rothschild notwithstanding, Jared Diamond mentions that the reason Zebras were never domesticated was that they had a bad habit of biting, really badly. He said there were ore Africans with zebra wounds than lion wounds. (Presumably, in a lion encounter the result is less likely to be a wound you talk about later…)