Scientists May Have Finally Found the Origin of One of History’s Most Important Inventions

• Many theories have tried to explain when and where the wheel and axle were first invented.

• A new study examines a relatively recent theory that miners in the Carpathian Mountains created the first wheel largely due to the limitations of their environment.

• Although the first innovation was little more than grooved rollers, the miners likely improved this system over the course of 500 years.

For an invention so world-changing as the wheel, scholars know surprisingly little about its origin story—but there is no shortage of possible theories.

One long-standing hypothesis is that the first wheel wasn’t really a wheel in the way that we tend to think about them, but instead a potter’s wheel constructed in Mesopotamia (likely by the Sumerians) around 4000 BCE. Yet another theory points to northern Turkey as the wheel’s possible birthplace. However, a new theory—first published in Columbia University professor Richard Buillet’s book The Wheel: Inventions and Reinventions—has recently been gaining traction. This new theory suggests that it was actually ancient copper miners moving ore deep within the mines in the Carpathian Mountains who created the very first wheels.

Now Bulliet, along with two co-authors from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Georgia Tech, have elaborated on this theory and used computational models to determine what environmental factors would’ve facilitated the evolution from rollers—essentially just logs with the limbs removed—to actual wheel-and-axle innovations. The results of the study were published this week in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

The researchers suggest that ancient mines would’ve been the perfect environment for the invention of the wheel to develop—not necessarily because of the necessity of such a tool, but because of the limitations imposed by the narrow mines themselves.

“Our findings also demonstrate the critical role that environmental factors played in the creation of wheeled technology,” the authors said in the paper. “The unique features of the mine environment accentuated the advantages of the wheelset over its predecessor while negating its most significant disadvantage: the inability to turn.”

The study breaks down the likely evolution of the wheel during its early days. First, miners would have created grooves in rollers in order to keep boxes that contained ore from sliding off the mountain. The end of the rollers would have then given a larger diameter to create a kind of proto-wheel-and-axle system (known as a wheelset). And finally, parts would have been added to the end of the axles for attaching independent wheels. The authors estimate that these innovations likely took place over 500 years.

“This chapter in human history runs counter to the popular belief that technologies arise abruptly from the sudden epiphany of a lone inventor,” the paper reads. “ Consequently, some scholars have embraced the other extreme, claiming that the wheel had no origin point and no inventor, but rather it developed gradually across a broad geographical area.”

Interestingly, this scientific approach that uses design science and computational mechanics allows scientists to make connections between structure and function in ancient engineering, and narrows down advantages and disadvantages of a system. This approach—combined with more traditional archaeology—can help paint a better picture of how technologies arose in human history, even when we don’t have direct evidence of its creation.

The invention of the wheel is only one mystery of history, and similar research could help shed light on some of the more obscured recesses of the human story.

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