I still can't reconcile how they didn't use the wheel for transportation. The explanations of lack of draft animals and unsuitable terrain aren't great. Not even a wheelbarrow?
They knew about the wheel (as some of their children toys had them), so the explanation is easy: They did not find it effective. Completely understandable. I spent my youth walking (and carrying a lot) in nature, and not once would I have tried to use a wheeled wagon and definitely not a wheelbarrow during those excursions. If I had a draft animal I would have used it to carry stuff (as people do, with horses and dogs), not a wagon with wheels - that would have been totally impractical. And the terrain where I grew up is way easier, by several orders of magnitude, than what I could see when I visited Yucatan some years ago.
I use my wheelbarrow to do work around my mountain property all the time. We have a 4-wheel utility cart that sees a lot of service too. Their utility lies in doing work over short distances.
So then we can conclude that for the type of work they did, in the area they did, they did not find it practical to use anything wheeled to help out. They knew about wheels, as already mentioned, so they obviously would have utilized wheels if that would have been effective. And they didn't, so it wasn't.
It mostly boils down to us overestimating the utility of wheelbarrows from the perspective of our modern, cushy lives. Ancient humans are not dumb and have as much desire to avoid labor as we do.
This was interesting; thank you. He admits that he can't really answer this question. His point about technology seeming obvious in retrospect is similar to the Egg of Columbus idiom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus
The video hints at the notion that they may just have not figured it out. Certainly working iron and steel would have been extremely useful, but they never developed that ability either, even after thousands of years of civilization. The interplay of a wheel and an axle may not be as intuitive as it seems to us in modern times.
One of the more esoteric explanations that I have heard is that there was a religious taboo around easing manual labor. And that the wheeled (and axled) figurines that we have found were not children's toys, but religious objects.