The following is an extract from Our Human Story, a newsletter about human evolution.  in your inbox every month.
This month, I’m going to tackle a question from OHS editor Chelsea Whyte:
“Is it possible to know who invented the wheel? Not what nation or region they lived in, but which person or group did it? Is this a stupid question? Seems like writing came around a similar time, but even if there’s no document or stone etching talking about it, wouldn’t the person have been spoken about? That seems like the kind of achievement that people would talk about and pass along!”
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Let’s first explore the invention of the wheel and why it’s so shrouded in mystery. Then we can go further, because the wheel is just one of many examples of crucial technologies whose inventors will almost certainly never be credited.
This wheel is fire
Chelsea is quite right about the timing. By 5000 years ago we have hard evidence of wheels being used in Europe. Meanwhile, the oldest known writing also dates from a little over 5000 years ago, though it was picture-based – alphabets took another few hundred years. The two inventions aren’t quite simultaneous, but they’re about as close as it gets when you don’t have detailed written records.
However, it doesn’t look like the same societies were using both. The oldest known writing systems are found in Mesopotamia and Egypt, but the oldest known wheels are in Europe. If we take this at face value, it suggests that the two technologies were invented in different places by different people. We don’t have a record of the person who invented the wheel, at least in part because their society didn’t have writing – even though others did.
Of course, the archaeological record is incomplete. It may be that we’re missing some examples of wheels and/or words, and actually the society where the wheel was invented did have writing. But it doesn’t look like it.
The thing is, even when societies do start keeping written records, inventors often don’t get recorded anyway. There are several reasons for this.
One is that the first writing was confined to elites. It was mainly used for things like tax records and propaganda. It was only later that people started writing about other topics.
But even once writing becomes really widespread, we often still don’t know who invented things. Archers who used English longbows changed the course of medieval European warfare, at a time when copious records were kept, but we have no idea who came up with the design for the weapons. Even in the modern era, we don’t know who invented bitcoin, so we don’t know who to blame for the existence of crypto bros.
This gets to how invention actually works in practice.
Wheel 2.0
It’s quite rare to be able to trace a single origin for a technology. Instead, most technologies are invented several times over, by different people in different places and times. At some point, one version takes off – but while it would be tempting to call that version’s creator the official inventor, that’s normally a silly oversimplification.
The wheel itself is an example. It didn’t become really common until thousands of years after the initial invention, thanks in part to the creation of really smooth roads and pavements. Before that, wheels were of limited use.
I still vividly remember a few years ago writing a story about why wheels don’t evolve in nature (bar some limited exceptions). There might be some physical limitations to biological wheels: if the wheel can spin freely about the axle, how do nutrients reach the wheel? But I suspect biologist Jennifer Hoyal Cuthill was right when she argued the real reason is that “wheels are terrible” on rough ground, and most ground is rough.
(By the way, while researching this I discovered that a reader letter responded to that story, pointing out that fantasy authors Philip Pullman and Terry Pratchett both came up with ingenious answers to the evolution-of-wheels problem. This is doubly annoying because I actually did mention Pullman’s mulefa in the first draft, but the editor cut them out. I wish I had seen the letter at the time, but even at this late date, let me just express my unbridled horror that anyone might think I hadn’t read His Dark Materials and all of Pratchett.)
Anyway, my point is that wheels took a long time to catch on, like most inventions. Remember, the archaeological record mostly only preserves things that were fairly common, so if we have wheels from 5000 years ago, they were probably invented long before but didn’t become widespread. The original inventors were dead and forgotten by the time wheels were used enough for the invention to be noteworthy.
Something similar is probably true of writing. Complex writing systems didn’t spring up fully formed, but developed from simpler ones that may go back tens of thousands of years. If you’ve been keeping up with żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ, you’ll have seen the recent story by Alison George proposing that hand stencils with missing fingers, painted on cave walls in the Stone Age, represent an early form of sign language. It’s easy to draw a line from that to pictographic languages like Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Invisible cars
Our attempts to reconstruct the history of inventions are further complicated by the fact that many technologies are invisible, because they don’t preserve well. Objects made of wood are less well represented than objects made of stone, but that doesn’t mean people weren’t using wood 100,000 years ago – it just means it has rotted.
For example, a study published in March looked at animal remains from Panga ya Saidi, a cave in south-east Kenya that people lived in on and off for 78,000 years. When humans were present, there were lots of remains of medium-sized animals like duikers, bushpigs and dwarf antelopes – some with cut marks on the bones suggesting butchery.
These are not animals you would hunt by throwing spears with stone tips. Instead, the researchers suggest ancient people used “remote capture” techniques such as snares, nets and traps. Crucially, such tools are “archaeologically invisible”: they don’t preserve well. It’s only by looking at the animal remains that we can infer people were using them.
Who were the creative geniuses that came up with wheels, nets and the written word? We don’t and can’t know, and therefore we should keep an open mind. When we imagine past inventors, it’s important not to impose upon them our own cultural biases. Some historians might assume that the inventor of the wheel was an adult male, but it could just as easily have been a woman. Conceivably it was someone with autism, which has been suggested to contribute to inventiveness.
The inventor could also have been a child: many of the more peculiar artefacts archaeologists find might actually be toys and playthings. It’s tempting to assume that wheels were invented for transport, or perhaps for grinding grain, but the first ones might just as easily have been fidget toys.
