Engineering the Origin of the Wheel

upstart writes:

Engineering the Origin of the Wheel:

Some historians believe the wheel is the most significant invention ever created. Historians and archeologists have artifacts from the wheel's history that go back thousands of years, but knowing that the wheel first originated back in 3900 B.C. doesn't tell the entire story of this essential technology's development.

A recent study [2024] by Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering Associate Professor Kai James, Lee Alacoque, and Richard Bulliet analyzes the wheels' invention and its evolution. Their analysis supports a new theory that copper miners from the Carpathian Mountains in southeastern Europe may have invented the wheel. However, the study also recognizes that the wheel's evolution occurred incrementally over time - and likely through considerable trial and error. The findings suggest that the original developers of the wheel benefited from uniquely favorable environmental conditions that augmented their human ingenuity. The study, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, has gained the worldwide attention of experts and more than 58 media outlets, including Popular Mechanics, Interesting Engineering, and National Geographic en Espanol.

"The way technology evolves is very complex. It's never as simple as somebody having an epiphany, going to their lab, drawing up a perfect prototype, and manufacturing it - and then end of story," said James. "The evidence, even before our theory, suggests that the wheel evolved over centuries, across a very broad geographical range, with contributions from many different people, and that's true of all engineering systems. Understanding this complexity and seeing the process as a journey, rather than a moment in time, is one of the main outcomes of our study."

[...] James and his team use computational analysis and design as a forensic tool to learn about the past, studying engineered systems designed by prehistoric people. Computational analysis offers a deeper understanding of how these systems were created.

"We have to interpret clues from ancient societies without a writing system - artifacts like bows and arrows, flutes, or boats - but we need to use additional tools to do this," James explained. "Carbon dating tells us when, but it doesn't tell us how or why. Using solid mechanics and computational modeling to recreate these environments and scenarios that gave rise to these technologies is a potential game-changer."

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