[fastball]

Making your own rope is easy with some trial and error. You just take a bunch of stringy things and twist them together to make a stronger stringy thing.

The twisting bit takes some finesse, and obviously you won't be making nylon rope with your bare hands, but making a grass rope is child's play.

Making a wheel, once you have the concept of a wheel, is pretty damn easy too. If you want a stone wheel, take a large stone and chip away until it resembles a wheel. If you want a wooden wheel, take a large piece of wood and whittle away until you have a wheel.

[haZard_OS]

I think that this sort of perspective is (at best) a-historical. I have absolutely no clue how difficult it would be to actually conceptualize "rope" or "wheel" without any of my modern knowledge.

The saying that 'hindsight is 20/20' would seem to be particularly true at the scale of early human invention and civilization.

[fastball]

  Good luck with making your own wheel or rope from scratch (i.e. alone and naked in the woods)!

This comment (by my interpretation) implies that the process is difficult. I agree with other comments stating the concept is difficult, but the process for those two inventions is quite manageable - even if you are "alone and naked in the woods".

[TheOtherHobbes]

Exactly. The invention isn’t the physical object, it’s the idea - the realisation that a certain class of objects/processes can be useful in unexpected and open-ended ways.

Wheels are almost useless in dense forests that have no roads, for obvious reasons. So why would anyone waste a day or two making one?

[pjc50]

Wheels are one thing, axles and their bearings and lubrication are another.

> take a large piece of wood and whittle away until you have a wheel

This does not resemble the actual construction of any but the smallest wooden wheel for toys.

[fastball]

You don't think this is how they built the original wheels?

[pjc50]

I'd prefer to rely on archaeological evidence rather than retroactive first principles; for example http://www.culture24.org.uk/history-and-heritage/archaeology... which shows a panelized wheel. I see SciAm have an article on the difficulties of a useful wheel too: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-it-took-so-lo...

[nradov]

You can't make a useful wheel out of a single large block of wood. It will dry out and crack. Wooden wheels are made of several pieces to minimize this problem.

[sametmax]

You are describing a more complex wheel already.

The first used wheel bas probably some vague round stone with a hole it it.

It sucked, but it was better than no wheel.