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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
| Maybe you have an image in your head, as I did, of a primitive caveman using stone tools to create a stone wheel. Turns (pun intended) out that the wheel was invented much, much later. And it's about time for another Merit Badge Mini-Contest! See below. https://www.wired.com/story/who-invented-wheel-how-did-they-do-it/ Who Invented the Wheel? And How Did They Do It? The wagon—and the wagon wheel—could not have been put together in stages. Either it works, or it doesn’t. And it enabled humans to spread rapidly into huge parts of the world. It's not like massive leaps of invention aren't known in modern times, so it shouldn't be surprising that someone made the leap from not-wheel to wheel. What is surprising, at least to me, is how recently (relatively speaking) it happened. 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. It's been widely noted that the Maya, a civilization in Central America, didn't have the wheel. Their other advancements were quite sophisticated -- the calendar, notably. And yet, the civilizations they would have had contact with, such as the Aztecs, did have that invention. I had the opportunity to speak with an actual Mayan once, and his assertion was that the wheel would have made things too easy. My personal theory is that the wheel might have been too sacred to use for mundane purposes; their fabled calendar was represented as a wheel of sorts. Whatever the actual reason, it's lost to time, and I'm not even 100% sure that they never used wheels. I mention this because, as the article notes, it seems to have been invented on both major continents, independently - not the only time such a thing has happened. The rest of the article focuses on the Indo-European version, which ties in to the entry I made a while back on the origins of most of the languages in Asia and Europe. The full‑size wagon first appeared approximately 5,400 years ago, and it may be one of the the first inventions in history to go viral. Archaeologists have discovered full‑size carts from southern Iraq to Germany within a few hundred years of each other at a time when cultural barriers were particularly impermeable. The wagon, it seems, was irresistibly useful. "If you build it, they will come." This is more of a case of "if you build it, you can go to them." The article is fairly long, so I won't go into it much further. It's there if you want to read it. But I found it interesting because, as I said, thanks to cartoons and whatnot I always thought the wheel was a much older invention. It's one of those things we take for granted now, but as noted at the link, there's really not anything in nature that could have inspired it, not like, say, you can watch birds and go "Wow, I wish I could do that," and then eventually invent flying machines. Since this article presents the wheel, as used in wagons, as one of the most important inventions of human civilization, I thought I'd make today's mini-contest about inventions. So...  Merit Badge Mini-Contest! Other than the wheel, what's the most important invention, or innovation, that we've made, and why? The response I like best gets its author a Merit Badge that I think is appropriate. As usual, you have until midnight WDC time (Today is August 18.) Just comment here below. I have a few in mind, but I'd rather hear from others. You can be serious or funny; I can certainly go either way. And there's no limit on how far back you want to go; prehistoric or modern will do. |
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