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Inventing the wheel.
I was reading about Machu Picchu and Inca stonework last week, and came across the hoary old colonialist talking point that the Incas did not invent the wheel. Being in a "go down internet rabbit holes" mood, I found myself reading various explanations for why precolumbian Americans, despite having wheeled figurines (see: image here and writeup here and early prototype pottery wheels (the kabal/molde, never scaled those figurines up or broadened their application to transport. Very few of the explanations sat well with me.
1 Lack of draft animals: handcarts and wheelbarrows, sans horses or oxen, are a huge step up from carrying cargo on your back. The lack of large domesticated animals in the Americas isn't germane.
2 Terrain issues: There was no way anybody in the Andes was going to think a wheeled handcart would be useful, but central America does have *some* flat places, and the Mayans made nice flat roads between their settlements. Not germane.
3 It was cultural: One site claimed the Maya and Aztecs believed that carrying heavy loads on your back was sacred, so they didn't scale up their wheeled figurines because of religion. This irritated me a lot. Yes, humans think up lots of weird rationalizations for doing something one way rather than another. But downtrodden workers told that their misery and suffering is pleasing to the Gods? Are going to invent a new religion. This explanation stinks.
4 Eventually I came across an article that looked at the question from the opposite direction: why did it take such a long time for people in the Fertile Crescent to invent the wheel? They had lots of flat land, big strong domesticated animals, and cities that needed to import lots of food over significant distances way back in 7000 BCE. From examining ancient ceramics we know that pottery wheels were a thing in the region by 4500, but it took another thousand plus years before wheeled vehicles appear. What was the hold up?
The article argues that the blocking issue for wheeled vehicles was the wheel-axle interface. It's easy to build a wheeled little figurine like the ones in the above picture, but once you start trying to make a cart that can move cargo, you need the rotating part and the non-rotating part to fit together perfectly, with minimal play but also minimal friction. Too tight, the wheel doesn't turn easily; too loose, it wobbles and breaks. The round peg of the axle and the round hole in the wheel (or axle and cart body if you go with a rotating axle) must be perfectly matched, perfectly smooth, and small enough to minimize friction yet large enough to be sturdy. The factor that made that possible in the late 4th millennia but not before, the article says, was bronze tools.
I say, close but not quite. The article makes the mistake of assuming that metal tools were a revolutionary world-changer, when actually stone tools continued to be used by people that had access to bronze for millennia after the start of the "bronze age." Stone was vastly cheaper, not that much worse than bronze in many applications, and could do things that metal could not (see the introduction to this book: https://books.google.com/books?id=MnqDijFSlJAC). And there's the problem that civilizations in Central America had bronze for a thousand years before the colonizers showed up, but still no wheeled vehicles.
People are far too easily hypnotized by simple, single-factor explanations. The development of the wheel was a coming together of multiple factors.
1. Mucking around with the spindles used to make thread for cloth gave people the concept (this is probably where the wheeled figurines in the Americas came from. I've found some references to wheeled figurines in the Old World, but haven't been able to determine if any have been found from before the first wheeled vehicles).
2. Impatient potters invented a rotating work surface for making coiled pottery more quickly, then realized that if they spun the pot they were working on, they could shape the spinning clay and this was easier than shaping a coiled pot. Which led to a quest for faster ways to spin clay. Incremental improvements led to actual potter's wheels, with a freely spinning work surface on an axle. (the engineering problems for a potter's wheel are not nearly as daunting as for a cargo-carrying wheeled cart - lower weight, with strain along the length of the axle instead of at right angles to it)
3. People tired of moving heavy things with sledges on rollers saw a potters wheel and started experimenting. Repeatedly, over centuries. Many failures ensued.
4. The arrival of bronze tools may have been a factor in finally putting that experimentation over the top.
Central American pottery wheels were still at the "spin the pot relatively slowly while laying coil" stage when the Spanish arrived. Not all the pieces had come together yet, and thanks to the conquest, they never would.
(extra bits that I found while writing this but that didn't fit are in comments)
1 Lack of draft animals: handcarts and wheelbarrows, sans horses or oxen, are a huge step up from carrying cargo on your back. The lack of large domesticated animals in the Americas isn't germane.
2 Terrain issues: There was no way anybody in the Andes was going to think a wheeled handcart would be useful, but central America does have *some* flat places, and the Mayans made nice flat roads between their settlements. Not germane.
3 It was cultural: One site claimed the Maya and Aztecs believed that carrying heavy loads on your back was sacred, so they didn't scale up their wheeled figurines because of religion. This irritated me a lot. Yes, humans think up lots of weird rationalizations for doing something one way rather than another. But downtrodden workers told that their misery and suffering is pleasing to the Gods? Are going to invent a new religion. This explanation stinks.
4 Eventually I came across an article that looked at the question from the opposite direction: why did it take such a long time for people in the Fertile Crescent to invent the wheel? They had lots of flat land, big strong domesticated animals, and cities that needed to import lots of food over significant distances way back in 7000 BCE. From examining ancient ceramics we know that pottery wheels were a thing in the region by 4500, but it took another thousand plus years before wheeled vehicles appear. What was the hold up?
The article argues that the blocking issue for wheeled vehicles was the wheel-axle interface. It's easy to build a wheeled little figurine like the ones in the above picture, but once you start trying to make a cart that can move cargo, you need the rotating part and the non-rotating part to fit together perfectly, with minimal play but also minimal friction. Too tight, the wheel doesn't turn easily; too loose, it wobbles and breaks. The round peg of the axle and the round hole in the wheel (or axle and cart body if you go with a rotating axle) must be perfectly matched, perfectly smooth, and small enough to minimize friction yet large enough to be sturdy. The factor that made that possible in the late 4th millennia but not before, the article says, was bronze tools.
I say, close but not quite. The article makes the mistake of assuming that metal tools were a revolutionary world-changer, when actually stone tools continued to be used by people that had access to bronze for millennia after the start of the "bronze age." Stone was vastly cheaper, not that much worse than bronze in many applications, and could do things that metal could not (see the introduction to this book: https://books.google.com/books?id=MnqDijFSlJAC). And there's the problem that civilizations in Central America had bronze for a thousand years before the colonizers showed up, but still no wheeled vehicles.
People are far too easily hypnotized by simple, single-factor explanations. The development of the wheel was a coming together of multiple factors.
1. Mucking around with the spindles used to make thread for cloth gave people the concept (this is probably where the wheeled figurines in the Americas came from. I've found some references to wheeled figurines in the Old World, but haven't been able to determine if any have been found from before the first wheeled vehicles).
2. Impatient potters invented a rotating work surface for making coiled pottery more quickly, then realized that if they spun the pot they were working on, they could shape the spinning clay and this was easier than shaping a coiled pot. Which led to a quest for faster ways to spin clay. Incremental improvements led to actual potter's wheels, with a freely spinning work surface on an axle. (the engineering problems for a potter's wheel are not nearly as daunting as for a cargo-carrying wheeled cart - lower weight, with strain along the length of the axle instead of at right angles to it)
3. People tired of moving heavy things with sledges on rollers saw a potters wheel and started experimenting. Repeatedly, over centuries. Many failures ensued.
4. The arrival of bronze tools may have been a factor in finally putting that experimentation over the top.
Central American pottery wheels were still at the "spin the pot relatively slowly while laying coil" stage when the Spanish arrived. Not all the pieces had come together yet, and thanks to the conquest, they never would.
(extra bits that I found while writing this but that didn't fit are in comments)
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I sort of knew that First Nations people around Lake Superior developed copper working over seven thousand years ago, well before anyone in the old world. The area had large deposits of pure copper nuggets, which they mined and smithed into ornaments and tools, for themselves and to trade.
What I hadn't known before was that after a few thousand years, around the time they turned from hunter-gathering to farming, those copper working peoples stopped using that copper for tools and just used it for ornaments. We're programmed to think of metal as superior to stone... but the extremely pure copper in those deposits was too soft, and thus inferior. With the transition to a new way of life and the need for new tools, they quit making tools with copper.
In the old world, on the other hand, natural copper nuggets had impurities that made the copper harder, and thus more interesting for producing tools, encouraging further experimentation in that direction, which led to smelting, bronze working, etc.
More here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-42185-y
And here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Copper_Complex
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Furthermore, we have records from the post contact era of disabled boats washing ashore in the Pacific Northwest with surviving crew members aboard (after up to a year of drifting across the ocean, surviving on the ship's stores or a cargo of food). These Japanese castaways became captives of the tribes that rescued them, and there's every reason to think that similar castaway survivors had ended up there before colonial contact as well. Speculations on just what kinds of influence those surviving castaways might have had on First Nations culture and technology would make for an interesting novel.
For those whose library subscribes to the right digital resources, there's an article here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40316086
(eta: the article disappointingly adopts a colonialist perspective, saying that aside from iron tools, the cargos of the wrecked ships would have been useless to the peoples that found them - ha ha, no. Not impactful in the long term? sure. Useless? Hell no. Most of the article's page count builds the case that junks were washing ashore in the PNW for as far back as we have records, so they must have been doing so before then as well, plus a short discussion of the remains of iron tools found in one archaeological site where conditions were right to preserve the tools from rusting away).
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'The wheel, the wheel' ignores that there were plenty of European scenarios where people moved goods from wheeled carts to boats or pack animals. Wheels were useful under limited circumstances. Only once you get to large-scale road building and engineering feats do wheeled vehicles become the transport mechanism of choice, and that's only if you count railways.
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Literal path dependency.
And all design builds on previous design. If the earliest types of wheels aren't very useful without large draft animals you aren't going to waste your time developing the types of wheels that make good handcarts.
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Heh.
It took me some time to recognise the wheel discussion as a subset of colonial racism: we define 'civilisation' as 'what we do' and no-one else lives up to it, so they must be inferior. See also writing and agriculture.
(I think my moment of fury came when, after being brought up on a diet of 'these stupid primitives, trading valuable pelts for <snigger> glass beads' I saw what intricate beautiful art people made with 'worthless glass beads' and grokked that if you can go out and hunt another pelt any day, it's not valuable, and that a novel means to make art is priceless in comparison. But that's not how we transmit the knowledge, and *that*, rather than going a different technological path, is the real problem here.)
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So I think all the hard engineering in wheel invention happened among potters, and then only after they had the whole wheel-axle thing pretty much nailed did someone interested in making a better way to haul heavy loads come along and start working on taking a pair of potters wheels and using them to scale up those miniature wheeled figurines into a load bearing cart. It just so happened that the people who perfected potters wheels also happened to have draft animals they could hitch to that cart, which helped.
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Likewise, the rolling plains of western central asia, another place with evidence of very early wheel usage, are flat and treeless - no roads needed, and the sheep raising horse nomads that inhabited the area from 1000 BC on definitely had wheeled carts but no roads.
On the other extreme, as I briefly mention, the Andes are not a place where anyone with sense would spend time working on inventing wheels for transport. People who wonder why the Incas didn't invent the wheel have never seen photos of the landscape in Peru.
Once it was invented, the wheel spread throughout Eurasia really, really fast, and to places that definitely did not yet have governments with the ability to build a road network. Being able to haul large loads with just a few oxen was the killer app of 5,000 years ago.
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And just to note, which you know - one reason domesticated pack animals will never go extinct until humans do is that there's always going to be areas where it's just easier to use animals than to try to build roads. No amount of bridges and tunnels is going to make wheels useful in the farthest, most mountainous hinterland.
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