In the book 1491 it suggests that the Andean civilizations actually had to create work for its citizens to do. There were three separate roads being constructed between the same two cities, for instance. You may have a point, Liberal, in that ease and simplicity were not priorities for some of these cultures.
We might speak of how the wheel is “demonstrably better” than hauling objects by main force, but “better” is a term relative to one’s culture. If the society’s objective is to keep everyone gainfully occupied, ease-of-use inventions aren’t a priority.
I reject the notion that people within the last several thousand years were less lazy or inventive that today. If something made an easier effort, it would get adopted (at least by the younger generation).
But it’s not clear to me that, absent draft animals or sophisticated technology, wheels do gain much of anything.
There is empirical evidence of this: Even with relatively advanced 18th century technology, dragging barrows and two-person carrying barrows were common along with wheel barrows. If handmade wooden wheels moving over unpaved surfaces gave a clear advantage, why did people still use drag barrows?
Once again, for the nth time, they can help make pottery.
Everyone assumes wheels for transportation, but what prompted me to start this thread (as stated in the OP) is that apparently a lot of people think that the potter’s wheel predated the use of the wheel for transportation, possibly by thousands of years. American people did a LOT of pottery, and that provides a lot of opportunity for experimentation and development – especially considering that we are talking about
1.)millions of individuals
2.)over many thousands of years and
3.)spread over two continents.
4.) And it has NOTHING to do with the availability (or not) of Draft Animals.
It is utterly amazing to me that, under those considerations, we don’t have evidence of a single group coming up with the potter’s wheel.
Nor, for that matter, of tops or yoyos, as far as I know.
They did have spindle whorls (as I said above), but the only transporation-type wheels were on miniature “toys”:
This BYU site talks about a Potter’s Wheel in Yucatan, and even cites an 1897 paper about a “Yucatan Potter’s Wheel”. But it’s pretty obviously a round tray that the potter can turmn – it has no axle to turn itself. It’s a step on the road to the potter’s wheel, but you;d have to be very generous to call it a potter’s wheel. BYU has an impetus to be generous – the Book of Mormon explicitly talks of wheels being used in the Americas. As an agnostic non-Mormon, I’m not as moved by that factor:
Sad but true. Do you think the original inventors had no slave labor force though?
I find that unlikely.
I would suspect that they had access to slave labor and still invented the wheel. That seems to take us back to successfully domesticated draft animals.
Absent any cultural bias, sure. But history does point to some examples where a culture rejected a perfectly suitable technology because their society deemed it necessary: particularly, Imperial Japan and firearms; and ancient China and sea travel.
Well, what are you asking for? Are you expecting a Doper to provide irrefutable evidence of a potter’s wheel to satisfy your sense of rightness? Or are you expressing your incredulity?
Who knows? Maybe the New World civilizations had a sufficiently different mindset that the various uses for a wheel simply weren’t a priority for them, compared to their tried-and-true methods.
When I (as a layman) look at the developments of the New World compared to the Old, I see lines and spirals instead of circles: I see the Mayan Long Count, I see coil pottery, I see a form of writing based on knots tied in strings. (Aren’t kernels on a cob of maize arranged in a spiral?) Maybe the natives just had a different way of looking at things, and they didn’t value perfect circles as the geometric-obsessed Greeks did. (Heck, maybe that’s why the Mayans sussed celestial mechanics faster than the Greeks: they didn’t have this preoccupation with circles to hamper their calculations.)
Strange, I was actually thinking that. As I recall, some of the greek inventions and discoveries were done by slaves. It is not out of the question that a well liked slave with some free time, tinkered and came up with something to help his family and friends.
I’d like to thank all the responders. I don’t really have an answer myself, and I didn’t really expect a definitive answer from anyone. But i wanted o throw that out there and see what developed.
Probably the easiest answer would be that the recent theories are wrong, and that the potter’s wheel developed alongside or after the transportation wheel (I know from my survey of websites that some people certainly believe this to be the case), and that the transportation wheel did require draft animals because of the great friction and recalcitrance of those early wood-on-wood axles. Human-powered carts and wheelbarrows, ijn this scenario, would come later, and by analogy with the animal-drawn vehicles.
I’m not saying that this is what happened, or that it is necessarily so, but it is consistent.
The explanation that “They didn’t think of it” is easy to toss off, but it’s an awfully big blanket of a statement. “They” here consists of thousands of years of history and two entire continents, and several entire advanvced covilizations that commanded large areas and massive public works. Many different groups used bow drills and made beads and the like – if that’s not an introduction to rotary motion and the principle of the axle, nothing is. A huge percentage of them made rotationally symmetric pottery, using at least a second cousin to the potter’s wheel, a rotating tray. That they didn’t come up with a wheel under these circumstances – not just missing it once, but many, many times over many centuries – still boggles my mind.
Perhaps they did come up with wheels not just once, but several times (heck, we know from the wheeled “toys” that they did it at least once), but it was lost or restricted by social or religious reasons. It would be interesting to find out exactly why.
You might as well ask why it took well over 1500 years for steam engines to be used as more than toys in Europe. The aeolipile was around in the first century C.E. but the concept wasn’t harnessed for anything useful until the mid-seventeenth century. The wheels on kids toys in Mexico date from around, what, 400, 500 C.E.? Maybe they just hadn’t gotten around to adapting them yet, in addition to the many other reasons outlined already.
Even in places that have cars, the use of carts and other wheeled transport is far from universal. I saw literally hundreds of porters using trump lines to carry heavy stuff when I was in Nepal recently.
True, but there’s a huge technological difference between a steam engine and a wheel. The one requires considerable capability and skill in engineering and a technology base to provide the materials. A wheel, once you know how to make it, requires relatively few tools and raw materials.
And the Aelopile was a far, far cry from even Newcomben’s engine, which was a far cry from Watt’s and other engines requiring fine tolerancing – you couldn’t build those until your capability for mretal machining had reached a pretty high pitch. Not much of this was going to be happening for a LONG time after Rome fell.
There is no indication as to who or what Adam Volk is.
The article also notes that the there is absolutely no evidence of wheels anywhere prior to ~4000BC. hat means there was 4000 years between the development of agriculture and the wheel’s invention. If it was as easy to invent the wheel as you seem to think, why did no one bother for four millennia?
We have good evidence that the wheel was invented (with the exception of toys) once. There there is no evidence that Europeans, Africans, Chinese or Americans invented it independently.
1.) I never said it was easy. I think people get an artificially foreshortened view of human history. There’s an immense expanse of time there, and an immense expanse of space (people were all over). Even with invention an extremely rare and fragile thing, multiple independent inventions , if considered purely as a probablistic process, ought to happen.
2.)"We have good evidence that the wheel was invented (with the exception of toys) once. ". No – we have good evidence (since we have wheels) that it has occurred at least once. More than that, you can’t say.
As I said previously, other civilizations will steal or adopt a technology if, when those two cultures connect, the technology has a demonstrable superiority. That cannot be said of all intermediate stages of the wheel’s development, especially in a place where the main competition is river travel, especially without draft animals.
If your first exposure to the Wheel is in the form of a long, smooth log, used to transport a monolith, you might say to yourself, “Gosh, that’s interesting, but how often am I going to need to move a rock that big? You have to find and chop down a long straight tree, then haul it to the quarry. Plus, you spend more time moving the log ahead than you spend moving the rock. And you have to clear a path through the jungle first?”
As you say, the potter’s wheel — if it could predate the wheel — is a demonstrable improvement. But is it a necessary improvement? Clay vessels, once made, last a good while; you can use the same bowl for a century. How much demand was there for a method of mass production?
The wheel’s first primitive stages could well have been invented a hundred times on every continent, then — if the next necessary steps are not taken — then forgotten again.
You could say as much for the city-states of ancient Greece, or of many other places the wheel has been used. And it’s not merely mass production – the method of manufacture also gives different properties to the finished product.
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The wheel’s first primitive stages could well have been invented a hundred times on every continent, then — if the next necessary steps are not taken — then forgotten again.
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Precisely the point I’ve been stating. I strongly suspect that this is the case with most inventions.
But the ancient Greeks were traders — they sent triremes around the Mediterranean loaded with wine and olive oil, which can’t be carried easily in baskets. It’s possible they needed to produce pottery more quickly, so the jars could be filled and sent abroad. Their technology adapted to their lifestyle (or possibly vice-versa).
I’m sure the Mesoamericans traded, too. All I’m suggesting is that this isn’t a case where one can simply say “all things being equal, Mesoamericans should’ve invented the wheel.” Human beings are equal in ingenuity, but their cultures are not identical, and pressures to invent vary from place to place. For instance, why didn’t bedouins invent the raincoat?
Indeed. But I didn’t require that they invented it, I asked why not. I still think there’s reason enough to do it.
But not everyone invents everything. There are throwing sticks all over the world, but I’m not familiar with anything quite like the Australian returning boomerang. Or any other toys like the Australian weet-weet. But the wheel is, one would think, a lot more basic than those.
