Technology · c. 3500 BCE
The wheel and the plough
Bronocice (southern Poland) and Uruk (Iraq)
Wheeled vehicles appear almost at once across a wide area in the second half of the 4th millennium BCE: a pot from Bronocice in Poland (c. 3600–3400 BCE) is incised with a four-wheeled wagon, pictographs from Uruk show wagons around 3500–3350 BCE, and the oldest surviving wooden wheel, from the Ljubljana Marshes in Slovenia, dates to about 3340–3030 BCE.
In the same era farmers in the Near East harnessed oxen to the ard, a simple scratch plough, part of a wider shift to using animals for pulling, milk and wool.
Why it mattered
Animal power multiplied the land a farming family could work and the loads it could move, opening up new land and making heavy overland transport practical.
Elsewhere
In Mesoamerica the wheel was invented independently but was used only on small wheeled toys, never for transport before the 16th century.
Related
- The world in 3000 BCE: The First Kings chapter
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