Did Sub-Saharan Africans ever invent the wheel on their own?

Factual Questions
1

I am asking this question at the risk of causing offense, but it’s something I’ve always wondered about. I am interested in history, not attacks on my semantics or the question itself (what I got on other websites!). I’m asking this in good faith.

Here goes:

Did any Sub-Saharan, black African civilization ever invent (i.e., discover) the wheel on their own and make wide use of it in their activities without outside influence from Arabs, Europeans, etc.?

2

It looks like the only people who independently invented the wheel were the Mesopotamians (and maybe the Chinese, depending on whether it got to China from Mesopotamia or not)

3

The Aztecs invented the wheel as a toy, but with no practical use.

Despite what we think, the wheel is clearly not an obvious invention. Other than the Mesopotamians (and the Aztecs), no other civilization got around to inventing the wheel (though they did adopt it when they saw it).

4

An affirmative answer to that question would first require that we find some population of humans in Africa which has not had any outside influence from other populations. One would be hard-pressed to find any such population anywhere in the world.

5

Well, in order to make any practical use of the wheel, you also need an axle. For transportation purposes (i.e. a cart) the primitive wheel and axle requires a domestic working animal, which did not exist in sub-Saharan Africa in the pre-Colonial period. The other applications for the wheel (spun fibers for textiles, pottery wheel, et cetera) were met by other technologies, so there was no pressing need for the development of the wheel.

Stranger

6

This question comes up with some regularity. I asked it recently, particularly asking why it was that if, as some believed, the first wheels were used as potter’s wheels, American civilizations did not invent the wheel. The usual argument is that American civilizations may have discovered the principal of the wheel )they used it in miniature vehicles often called “toys”, although we don’t know their function), and that, since American civilizations by and large had no draft animals, they didn’t come up with the wheel. But they DID have a large and active collection of potters, with sophisticated techniques. You’d think that, if Potter’s wheels started it all, Americans would have invented the wheel as well*. There’s no evidence that they did. Perhaps the transporation wheel really is necessary to give the basic technology or impetus for the potter’s wheel. Or perhaps it simply is chance that they did not invent it on their own, aside from those curiously unutilized “toys”.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=470833&highlight=wheel+invent

  • People just say “Oh, well, they didn’t think of it.” I think this belittles the scope of this theater of civilizations – we’re talking about thousands of years of civilzation, some of it quite large and sophisticated, spread out over two continents, and a lt of it laboriously turning out hand-shaped or coiled pottery. . That’s a lot of potential for coming up with th potter’s wheel.