[mattnewport]

I feel it's a little more complicated and nuanced than this article suggests. If there is this technological inevitability, how to explain the lack of wheels in the Americas mentioned in the article? Some argue that similarities in widely separated cultures like in South America and Egypt suggest an unknown common origin. The case of the wheel is a little hard to explain either way. We do have historical examples of technologies being largely lost / forgotten however (the fall of the Roman Empire and the dark ages, Easter Island). Is the wheel better explained by a common origin that one culture forgot or a failure of technological inevitability?