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Type31971 t1_j1ic67r wrote

Reply to comment by anarchysquid in Simple/Short/Silly History Questions Saturday! by AutoModerator

Draft animals aren’t a necessity to make the wheel useful for transportation. If anything it’d make weaker animals more useful, and wheeled carts being drawn by humans have existed in Europe and Asia for centuries, if not millennia.

The need for tight turning ability in cities would have made the wheel a welcome addition in mesomerica, and the reduced workload going up inclines with wheels is superior to non-wheeled.

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anarchysquid t1_j1ifi5c wrote

Whats your alternative theory?

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Type31971 t1_j1ilibh wrote

The Americas were hit and miss. They pioneered the zero in mathematics while large swaths were no farther advanced than the Stone Age when Europeans showed up on their doorstep. Saying they lacked inventiveness is a stretch, but at the same time having access to the wheel but not taking this basic technology to its logical conclusion is maddening

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TheBattler t1_j1jorq0 wrote

>wheeled carts being drawn by humans have existed in Europe and Asia for centuries, if not millennia.

Okay but that doesn't matter when our earliest archaeological evidence for carts is often tied to cattle; the Brononice pot abstractly depicts a wagon and was found alongside the remains of an auroch. Tripolye culture toy bull is literally a bull on wheels. Evidence for carts and wagons appear in present-day Ukraine just after the introduction of cattle.

It's a boring answer but for whatever reason, humans didn't think they needed a cart until they had some other poor animal to drag it around.

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Type31971 t1_j1jxt69 wrote

Art of cattle pulling a cart doesn’t mean human-pulled carts weren’t developed at the same time or earlier. On top of that there’s no evidence that mesoamerican cultures stopped developing wheeled carts because of an absence of large domesticated draft animals. The Maya didn’t shrug their shoulders and say “This could be awesome, if only… oh well”

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TheBattler t1_j1k3y8f wrote

Yes, everybody on this sub knows the absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence...but this is to our best current knowledge.

>On top of that there’s no evidence that mesoamerican cultures stopped developing wheeled carts because of an absence of large domesticated draft animals.

If that's your standard for why they didn't develop wheeled carts, you'll basically never have a satisfactory answer. It's next to impossible to prove a negative using archaeology.

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Type31971 t1_j1k8tx2 wrote

There is never gonna be a satisfactory answer. As I said before, large swaths of the Americas were still Stone Age societies when Europeans made contact… You’d think all of continental humanity would have advanced beyond that point

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