Who Ate the First Oyster? by Cody Cassidy

Author:Cody Cassidy [Cassidy, Cody]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

11

Who Invented the Wheel?

If the time of our species on earth were a day, this happened 25 minutes before midnight (5,400 years ago).

5,400 years ago

First wheel

Hundreds of thousands of years before the invention of the wheel, some unlucky hominin stepped on a loose rock or unstable log and—just before they cracked their skull—discovered that a round object reduces friction with the ground.

The inevitability of this moment of clarity explains the ancient ubiquity of rollers, which are simply logs put underneath heavy objects. The Egyptians and the Mesopotamians used them to build their pyramids and roll their heavy equipment, and the Polynesians to move the stone moai statues on Easter Island. But rollers aren’t terribly efficient because they have to be replaced as they roll forward, and even if they’re pinned underneath, friction makes them horribly difficult to move. The solution—and the stroke of brilliance—was the axle. Yet despite the roller’s antiquity, it doesn’t appear that anyone, anywhere, discovered the wheel and axle until an ingenious potter approximately six thousand years ago.

The oldest axle ever discovered is not on a wagon or cart, but instead on a potter’s wheel in Mesopotamia. These may seem like simple machines, but they’re the first evidence that anyone anywhere recognized the center of a spinning disk is stationary and used it to their mechanical advantage. It’s a completely ingenious observation and so novel it’s unclear where the idea came from—perhaps from a bead spinning on string?—as it has no obvious corollary in nature. The pole is called an axle, and many scholars consider it the greatest mechanical insight in the history of humankind.

Yet there exists another great intellectual leap between the potter’s wheel and a set of wheels on a rolling object. The full wheel set appears to have first been invented by a mother or father potter, because the world’s oldest axles are made of clay, are about two inches long, and sit beneath rolling animal figurines.

The first wheeled vehicle, in other words, was a toy.

As we’ve seen, there is a general reluctance in archaeology to describe any ancient artifact as a toy, but in this case the evidence feels overwhelming.

In July 1880, the archaeologist Désiré Charnay discovered the first pre-Columbian wheel set in the Americas. It was on a small coyote figure mounted on four wheels, and Charnay found it in the tomb of an Aztec child buried south of Mexico City.

As Charnay presumes in his book The Ancient Cities of the New World, the toy was a memento of “a fond mother . . . who, ages gone by, buried [it] with her beloved child.”

The Aztec child lived thousands of years after the inventor in the high steppe but before the Europeans arrived with their wheels in the Americas, which suggests that in both the New and Old Worlds a mother or father potter independently invented the wheel and axle to make a toy.

The archaeologists I spoke with are hesitant to believe such a remarkable insight could have been made in the pursuit of something as frivolous as an object for play.

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