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Why is the first wheel always shown as stone? Surely a log would have lent itself to the discovery of rolling much more readily
I would guess logs don’t lend themselves to the historical/fossil whatever record as well as stone does. The oldest wheels we’ve found are stone because any potential log ones deteriorated, and this was all before written records.
That entire idea is so absurd I had to check.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel
Looks like the first transportation-related evidence of wheel we have was made of clay (probably because it was a toy). The first transportation-related actual wheel that we found was made of wood. The first wheel-shaped object we found wasn’t used for transportation and was made of wood.
Stone is just a really bad material for making wheels. But I wrongly expected to see some metal ones on the list.
Fantastic example of survivorship bias.
The logs have since been rotated, got it.
Imagin if logs were actually perfect material for designing that one shape that produces infinite energy, food, and research.
Do you see any trees in that drawing? It seems cavemen existed exclusively in barren volcanic wastelands.
Haha yes, cavemen only lived in caves far away from forests of course.
Or maybe forests are just too complicated to draw for a cartoon.
Well duh, they’re cavemen not forestmen
Obviously the dinosaurs were eating all the trees
Wheels were useless anyway until the invention of the axle, around 3500 BCE.
Mill stones are paleolithic so like 7000 years prior to the wheel and the good ones are just wheels with intentionally angled faces.
What good’s an axle without…the grabby thing that holds the axle or whatever it connects to?
Not to mention the lack of internal combustion engines to power the whole thing.
Because the oldest reference disks we have are millstones? Idk. They always look like millstones to me
Might be more to do with stone lasting far longer than wood when it comes to decay.
You’d be surprised how long wood can last, but yeah stone certainly doesn’t need such specific circumstances
When it was on TV, the Flintstones cartoon made it to everyone’s mind.
Rolling logs is something even beavers have probably been rediscovering over the eras.
The Flintstones fascinated me when I was a kid because everything had already been invented but it was just made out of rocks and wood instead of metal and plastic. So for example they had a stone dishwasher appliance powered by a bird or something.
Comedy
Might have been grinding wheels for wheat; don’t have to be replaced as often and if in a stone track don’t have to worry as much about breakage. But that’s just a theory…. A history theory… or at least a history conjecture
I…I can’t tell if this is commentary about now or not. Is that bad?
I first read it as neanderthals are less aggressive so they must focus now on weapons. I’m pretty sure the intention is that the guys working on the wheel have to stop because the current leadership are neanderthals.
I think neanderthals were less war-like than humans because humans eradicated all of them, but I’m probably reading too much into it.
I think neanderthals were less war-like than humans because humans eradicated all
Akchually, Neanderthals were humans and we don’t know why they disappeared. The idea that homo sapiens eradicated them all is probably a wrong one; their decline begun before the arriving of homo sapiens.
The most recent suggestion I saw is that there were just more sapiens when they started interacting. Interbreeding must have happened, but with new groups of sapiens continuously arriving from the middle east, the neanderthal DNA just got more and more dilute. Eventually “pure” neanderthals no longer existed.
Akchsually if you look at the genetic markers in modern populations its pretty clear what happened. 🍆💦 👶
They ate egg plant, at which point there were heavy rains which did them in?
The combination of eggplant and deluge turned them all into babies. Unable to hunt or communicate, they were wiped out.
Babies are actually pretty good communicators 🤓
Europeans and Asians also have roughly 2% Neanderthal DNA on average, so it’s likely we absorbed a significant chunk of their population into our own.
Pretty sure those 2% refer to the subsection of the genome that is unique to homo sapiens. We have >98% shared DNA among all great apes (including humans)
We also might simply have outbred them. Remember that modern humans have what appears to be detectable Neanderthal DNA so interbreeding has apparently occurred; we might simply have diluted them into perceived extinction. Besides, there doesn’t seem evidence for large-scale war.
Of course that’s all speculation.
Neanderthals were also comparatively expensive, which is great when food is plentiful, but gave us the edge when food was scarce
Huh I never thought about Neanderthals that way, but it makes sense. Crazy that now we refer to them as “less civilized” or more “savage”, considering what war is.
To add to that, evidence suggests that, not only were their brains larger than ours, but they likely had a higher capacity to learn than we do. Not to mention them being bigger and stronger than us too. We most certainly were the savages. It seems some things never change.
https://www.fortinberrymurray.com/todays-research/were-the-neanderthals-smarter-than-we-are
It’s also known, from an invasive frog (cane toad) in Australia, that adaptation can occur due to rate of travel. I’m not sure that’s relevant here, it’s just another example of how we’ve found quirks of evolution.
actually it’s a bit the opposite: neanderthals were slightly less cognitively developed, likely in tool use, creativity, and also social structures
(Species specific disadvantages on the wikipedia page)
It’s fine. The EU welcomes scientists from the USA.
“U.S.-based applications to the European Research Council (ERC) surged five-fold in August 2025”
https://www.politico.eu/article/european-research-council-funding-us-researchers-relocation-europe/
“Volcanic eruptions are a scam! Ofk we must build on top of hot smooky mountain!”
“MAKE NEANDERTHAL GREAT AGAIN”
It was the other way around. Making up lies and ganging up on others is a very sapiens thing to do.
The current scientific reality is what we know about Neanderthals implies that you probably wouldn’t have noticed much of a difference in either direction.
They were fully aware cousins with art, music, and ritual behavior, and they were closely related enough to interbreed.
Thank you for honoring some of our ancestors
Wheel no good on rough ground. Wheel need road network and specialized labor. Befriend animal. He carry.
Freshly baked meme
Why research the wheel? It is already invented. No need to reinvent it.
What is innovation and improvement anyway?
It isn’t like we research things that already exist!
That’s not how research works. We’re still advancing wheel tech for adaptability and use in different environments and conditions.
The wheel is overrated historically. You need paved roads for a wheel to be useful while a donkey train climbs mountains.
What if instead of making something up and barfing onto my screen you spend 3 seconds of googling and actually learning something? Because one thing you can be certain of that there were not many pawed roads 10k bc
The wheel, first used effectively in ancient Mesopotamia, revolutionized human history by enabling faster transportation for goods and people, transforming warfare with chariots, revolutionizing agriculture and crafts through irrigation and grinding techniques, and forming the foundation for modern machinery, including waterwheels and windmills, which drove industrialization and continues to shape our world today (https://www.citeco.fr/10000-years-history-economics/the-origins/invention-of-the-wheel#%3A~%3Atext=The+wheel+was+invented+in%2Cthe+basic+mechanism+in+windmills).&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwir3ODIvYKQAxXp_rsIHQ9mK64QgMkKegQIThAE&usg=AOvVaw0GmNq2t-l7KEwCmTL7tZcb)
I meant it more as in the context of subsaharan Africa not having the wheel until the 19th century. Wheels for transportation were pretty much useless until they got roads there.
I see now I should have caveated my post with 5 qualifiers now.
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No you didn’t! If you meant that you would have said that as there is an titsy bitsy bit of a difference between a region of a continent to a time and the whole wide world until now!
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And still, thats a whole lot of bs!
…The wheel was well known, with pottery wheels and water wheels used, and even wheeled transport in some regions like ancient Nubia and Ethiopia… (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_wheel_in_Africa)
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Your mom was in that donkey train
She was only there because she thought the train would take her to get a donkey punch.
Camels and rivers were also major modes of transportation.
Pretty good video on that whole context: Why precolonial Africa didn’t have the wheel
Rivers are the GOAT
Found the Neanderthal
