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Wheels are generally only an improvement over carrying stuff (including with pack animals) when you need to move across fairly flat and solid surfaces. The mountains of Peru, being extremely not flat, turned out to be a poor environment for early wheels (slight error here, see FlyingSquid below)
Same reason West Africa adopted and then abandoned the wheel. Turns out that in a lot of the environments there, camels did the job better once we figured out how to domesticate them
What I think is interesting is that those civilizations also didn’t develop pottery wheels mill wheels, which makes me wonder if the wheel as transport is necessary to develop those technologies.
Also interesting to me is that the wheelbarrow was invented thousands of years after the wheel. You do need to invent an axle for a wheelbarrow to exist, but you would still think they would have been obvious technology. Nope, it was invented in first century BCE China.
That said, the person you replied to was slightly off. It wasn’t the Incas, it was Mesoamericans. People like the Mayans. You were still correct though, it had no utility as transport in a jungle environment either.
Wheels are generally only an improvement over carrying stuff (including with pack animals) when you need to move across fairly flat and solid surfaces. The mountains of Peru, being extremely not flat, turned out to be a poor environment for early wheels (slight error here, see FlyingSquid below)
Same reason West Africa adopted and then abandoned the wheel. Turns out that in a lot of the environments there, camels did the job better once we figured out how to domesticate them
What I think is interesting is that those civilizations also didn’t develop pottery wheels mill wheels, which makes me wonder if the wheel as transport is necessary to develop those technologies.
Also interesting to me is that the wheelbarrow was invented thousands of years after the wheel. You do need to invent an axle for a wheelbarrow to exist, but you would still think they would have been obvious technology. Nope, it was invented in first century BCE China.
That said, the person you replied to was slightly off. It wasn’t the Incas, it was Mesoamericans. People like the Mayans. You were still correct though, it had no utility as transport in a jungle environment either.
Ahh thank you, I actually also misremembered which bit of the Americas that story was from. I think I had the Inca road network in mind.