May
16th
Sat
16th
It wasn’t just the Incas who failed to invent the wheel; every other civilization in the New World… managed to overlook it as well. … The fact is that most civilizations in the Old World didn’t invent the wheel either—instead, they borrowed it from some other culture. The wheel appears to have been first used in Sumer in the Middle East around 3500 BC, whence it spread across Europe, Asia, and North Africa. It didn’t arrive in Britain until 500 BC. This orderly diffusion pattern makes it conceivable that all the wheels in use today are directly descended from the invention of a single gifted individual[.]
