Towns are older than the wheel
Permanent settlements such as Jericho were inhabited thousands of years before the first wheeled vehicles, which appear around 3500 BCE.
Established2 min read
Jericho’s tower and walls belong to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, around 8000 BCE and earlier. Çatalhöyük is a dense town of the seventh millennium, with no streets built for carts because there were no carts. The earliest certain wheels and wheeled pictographs are fourth-millennium, in Mesopotamia and the Eurasian steppe.
Pottery, bread, and houses all beat the axle. The wheel is a late optimisation for moving heavy things across flat ground, useless in mountains and sand until the road exists. Sequence is the surprise: settlement first, circle second.
Caveats
- Toy or potter’s wheels and vehicle wheels are different inventions. The claim is about wheeled transport.
- Dates shift as new finds appear. They do not put carts in Neolithic Jericho.
Sources
- 1Anthony D. W.. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language. Princeton University Press, 2007.