(June 24, 2022 at 3:30 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote:(June 24, 2022 at 2:32 pm)Jehanne Wrote: Some archeologists have written that the time between the invention of the pottery wheel and its rotation by 90 degrees by some unknown individual was around 10,000 years.
If that is meant to suggest what is seemingly obvious to us eluded the mesolithic and neolithic people for 10000 years, then I suspect it is not so simple as that. i suspect they know just as well as we do that you can make a disk of wood with a axle in the middle and it would save a lot of work to use it to carry load. but they probably also realize that only works if you have firm flat surfaces on which to roll the wheel. if you have to carry the wheel part of the time over right ground, then it makes the entire wheel not worth while.
The obvious did elude our distant ancestors, that's my exact point. Even negative numbers, which are obvious to many early elementary students, appeared thousands of years after the rise of agriculture, invention of bronze & iron, etc.
