> Archaeology has now revealed that the wheel wasn’t invented until the 4th millennium BC – which puts it thousands of years after the first cities were built and after the invention of metallurgy, and its importance in determining the intelligence of a race is no longer rational.
Boats solve a more basic problem. No-one needs wheels - there are other means of transportation available.
Also, the above article points out that Mesoamericans seem to have independently invented the wheel, and even made wheeled toys.
You could say something similar about the Polynesians, although they came later
Rollers for moving heavy items, pulleys for ...er ... moving heavy items; or are they not classed as wheels? Wheels are good for farming too, laying furrows, say. And making clay pots. And grinding corn. And crushing fruit.
Ah, this might turn in to a "What has the wheel ever done for us" sketch after the style of Monty Python.
I suppose it hinges on what is the simplest and most useful thing a wheel could be used for in a primitive society? Building a wheel with an axle and framework is not a trivial undertaking, and someone would need an immediate use for it to justify the effort.
(Try making a decent sized wheel out of a plank - it'll shatter along the grain. Getting a snug 90 degree hole for the axle isn't trivial, either, and without that the wheel will wobble so badly it'll be largely useless.)
They're talking about coastal migration over centuries. Also there's excavations of boats that are dated earlier than estimates for the wheel so I'm not sure what your point is.
"Circumstantial evidence, such as the early settlement of Australia over 40,000 years ago, findings in Crete dated 130,000 years ago,[4] and findings in Flores dated to 900,000 years ago,[5] suggest that boats have been used since prehistoric times. ... The oldest recovered boat in the world is the Pesse canoe, a dugout made from the hollowed tree trunk of a Pinus sylvestris and constructed somewhere between 8200 and 7600 BC" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boat
"The invention of the wheel falls into the late Neolithic, ... 4500–3300 BCE: Chalcolithic, invention of the potter's wheel; earliest wooden wheels (disks with a hole for the axle); earliest wheeled vehicles, domestication of the horse" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel
Well, just like the wheeled toys (i.e. wheel "invented" but not used for transportation/vehicles) the dugout from a trunk is a sign that sort of canoes existed.
Inventing a canoe or a raft is of course much easier than inventing the wheel, you just go on the shore of a river or at the seaside and you will find trunks or wooden pieces floating.
From that to have a boat capable of crossing an ocean there is a long way.
Also, the numbers would be important.
I would presume that leaving from a shore in search of another one (and knowing nothing on where that could be) would have been an extremely dangerous attempt, most probably taken by a handful of young males (hunters/gatherers, etc.) in the hypothesis that society was a male dominated one, possibly in very small/basic boats.
Then they would need to go back home, and then return bringing with them their spouses and presumably children.
Think of a future archaelogist in - say - 5,000 years time (after humanity and civilization collapsed) finding ONLY a hut with a few (perfectly conserved) surf tables and windsurfs.
From that finding to believe that windsurfs could be used for cross-sea or cross-ocean migrations there is somehow a large gap.
My comment was to support the parent comment asking why the grandparent comment expressed surprised that a boat was invented before the wheel.
I don't understand what the point of your comment is.
The first humans in the Americas didn't need to cross an ocean. They needed to follow the shoreline. Even now the Bering Straight is only 90 km across. As the article points out, during the Ice Age, when the sea was lower, it was all land, known as Beringia. There was no "cross-sea or cross-ocean migration".
We know humans 60,000+ years ago could cross the Weber Line, which was also at least some 90 km wide, to get from Sunda to Sahul (which includes modern Australia). This migration to the Americas would have been easier than that.
>I don't understand what the point of your comment is.
I was actually supporting the idea that inventing the boat is (should be) easier than inventing the wheel BUT that between inventing the boat and actually being able of building big enough boats AND boats being able to cross large stretches of water AND actually using them to "migrate" a population there are some leaps.
The grandparent comment was not about "boats", was about "boats that can travel across the ocean" and the article was
about the hypothesis of a migration by boat.
One of the indigenous boats of the region, the umiak, can be 30 feet long or so and can carry 20 people (or a fair amount of cargo).
They're easily big enough to cross the Bering Strait (in fact, before the Cold War, they did it routinely) and can be constructed completely from local materials (sea mammal hide covering, whale bones and driftwood for ribs -- modern umiaks often use metal fasteners, but traditional ones didn't).
Alaska Natives still prefer them for some tasks (e.g., whale hunting).
While what you say is true, to quote the second-level comment: "They're talking about coastal migration over centuries"
That requires neither a big boat nor one which can cross large stretches of water. That's why I didn't understand where your comment fit into the topic.
We don't need to resort to archaeology. The indigenous people of the Bering Strait region could, and did, routinely cross it in boats made from local materials (animal hides, mostly) for centuries, and were still doing so at the time of European contact.
Maybe they put people on a raft and sent them out to sea as a form of punishment or sacrifice, and some of them made it across. If it was a common enough practice, it wouldn't take long for survivors to start meeting and multiplying.
> I would presume that leaving from a shore in search of another one (and knowing nothing on where that could be) would have been an extremely dangerous attempt
Yet it was how the Polynesians settled the Pacific.
> Archaeology has now revealed that the wheel wasn’t invented until the 4th millennium BC – which puts it thousands of years after the first cities were built and after the invention of metallurgy, and its importance in determining the intelligence of a race is no longer rational.
Boats solve a more basic problem. No-one needs wheels - there are other means of transportation available.
Also, the above article points out that Mesoamericans seem to have independently invented the wheel, and even made wheeled toys.
You could say something similar about the Polynesians, although they came later