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Comment by meddlepal | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of impressive they accomplished so much without inventing the wheel... or has that been debunked and is just long outdated information?

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Some wheeled toys have been found in Mexico, it’s not like the wheel was never invented. But The Americas didn’t have domesticable large animals that could be used to pull wheeled carriages (bisons were not domesticated at the time), that’s why the wheel was never used for that purpose.

Indeed it’s very impressive how much they accomplished by themselves without the wheel, without big domesticated animals and without contact with other civilizations.

Furthermore the land in southeast mexico is very hilly, and when it's not, it's often swampy or waterlogged (or was at the time of the maya). It's certainly more straightforward to use barges.

Related, I very much recommend the book "Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs".

I second this book too, it's a great introduction to Mesoamerican civilization. The author, Michael D. Coe, also has another excellent book "Breaking the Maya Code" on the decipherment of the Maya glyphs The fundamentals were done in 1950-60's by Knorozov and Proskouriakoff, but the decipherment was only widely accepted until as recently as the 1970's[1]!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_script#Decipherment

Apparently Richard Feynman made fundamental contributions, being more numerate than your average archaeologist.

Wheelbarrows (Both European, and Chinese) are very useful, and do not require large animals to pull.

They aren't super-great in hilly terrain, though.

Human pulled carts are common, too. I live on a very steep hill, and use a dolly a lot to bring something up. It's a heluva lot easier than carrying stuff. Not even close. I can easily manage 4-5 times the weight on the dolly than I could carry.

Even navigating stairs with a dolly is easier than carrying a heavy weight, and much safer, too.

I'm utterly unconvinced by Jared Diamond's claim that lack of pack animals made the wheel irrelevant.

Oh, and any significant construction site would find it useful to make a road to it, even if they only were carrying things.

Even when barging heavy loads, to get the load off the barge and up to the site a dolly is still highly useful.

The Mayans did in fact make roads: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacbe

I don't believe we even have evidence whether or not the olmec culture had a state. If you're looking for a better narrative, "time" is a decent one. I don't believe there's much evidence of ergonomic hand carts until pretty much modern times. Personally I'm not holding my breath for a decent explanation, ever, especially when the wheel toys are concentrated in an area known for not preserving wood well sans mudslide.

In any case, the baggage cart like you're describing, or maybe a hand truck, seem to be both artifacts coming out of industrialized society. I'm not sure how useful one would be on a steep hill if the cart itself, including the axle and wheels, were made of wood. You don't really see modern, usable baggage carts until the industrialized production of steel (I'd love to be corrected). Hand carts? Sure, but of a more significant weight:load ratio meant for longer distance, heavy load, flat hauling—remember these suckers often have brakes you wouldn't want to engage on a runaway cart, like a peg through the spoke or axle or a wedge under the wheels.

I'd think some kind of carrying + strap frame like you see today would be a better fit for personal hauling and balsa might even work well for it.

> were made of wood

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ljubljana_Marshes_Wheel

Wheel & axle made of wood, for a two wheel push cart.

Spend some time using an ordinary dolly to move heavy boxes around, then try carrying them. There's just no comparison.

Besides, it's one thing to say that wheel technology is gated by metals technology, quite another to say it is gated by the existence of pack animals.

Wow, cool! Thanks for the link.

The axle is also very clearly a turned part, probably made on a lathe.

I’m not quite sure of your point—the cart was obviously found in a swamp and would have been poorly suited to hauling things up “steep hills”. I would at least have used a spoked wheel if I were arguing the obvious need of a handcart, the weight and stability difference over rough terrain is quite large. That, or provided video evidence you want to haul a solid wood cart up a steep hill with groceries.

I’m pointing out projecting modern needs backwards out of speculation isn’t likely to yield much understanding of why someone didn’t invent a handcart in precolumbian mesoamerica. Jared Diamond at least compares the material conditions of the two sets of continents—that seems like a decent tactic for approaching the past, even if I do have large complaints with his confident narratives.

When you're building a stone building, you'll want to be hauling heavy stones. Even a heavy-ish wooden cart would be most helpful with that.

I've been to Chichen-Inza. It's flat.

The Egyptian chariots had wooden wheels and axles, and were light.

https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/course...

> useful to make a road to it

A rail road even. Dogs and goats are useful for pulling sleds over a rail. Or a trail.

I agree that the size of the animal doesn't makes wheels less worthwhile.

Just think: every single ounce of dirt and stone that comprises that structure was picked, carried, and placed with only human calories expended, likely in baskets carried on backs. I wonder what the amount of total calories expended to complete the project would be? Incredible to think about.

Is rolling stuff on logs considered using wheels?

> The Americas didn’t have domesticable large animals

... by then. They could have had horses, camels, and various others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_animals...

It's a yes and no kinda thing, last time I checked in on it. There are examples of children's toys with wheels made by Mayans, but examples of wheeled vehicles don't exist. There's an argument that they lacked suitable beasts of burden to pull vehicles (at best is a llama, which isn't really great at pulling), so that might be why, but that's ultimately conjecture.

Llama is Incan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llama#/media/File:Lama_glama_V...

Sure, but the Mayans vaguely knew about them.

The Mayan collapse occurred 700 years before the Inca Empire was founded (and the Aztec Empire, for what it's worth).

Did the Inca genetically engineer llamas? Clearly they were around before the Inca, just like they are still around, even after the Inca.

It's a domestic species, just like, say, modern cattle are domesticated aurochs. The wild equivalents are the guanacoes. They may be physically very similar, but they're different behaviourally.

It's a domesticated species, but it was domesticated well before the Inca civilisation.

There was civilization in the Andes for thousands of years before the Inka. We just know little about them. Likewise in the Maya homelands.

People who live in Peru and study the ruins distinguish three megalithic stonework traditions, with the Inka the least sophisticated. The Inka's predecessors routinely handled rocks of tens, and up to hundreds of tons, slicing them into non-convex polygonal shapes and fitting them like puzzle pieces. The Inka worked only much smaller rocks.

Originally, the king was the Inka. No name for the civilization he ruled has surfaced.

Any wheeled tools at least? I may not have a horse to drag a refrigerator to my new apartment, but I'd rather use a hand truck than bear it manually.

They rolled large blocks on logs via the same methods you see with all the pyramid building cultures.

IIRC Viking used logs as well to transport their ships between rivers, so they can raid the usually very surprised towns and vilages downstream, especially for rivers going south.

Note that China made extensive use of undrawn sailbarrows to carry things over long distances.

What's an "undrawn sailbarrow"? Your comment is the only thing that shows up on Google search.

It's a fairly conventional manned wheelbarrow, but with a sail to assist.

No; a conventional wheelbarrow rests its weight on a wheel at the front and on the human holding the handles at the other end (since it's impossible to balance on the front wheel).

The sailbarrow has a large central wheel that bears the weight, relieving the human of the need to personally support the weight of whatever's being carried.

In the case of the Chinese wheelbarrow, that is correct, but the sail is an improvement added later to the existing conventional design of the region and era which happened to use a central wheel.

I'm no expert on international wheelbarrow histories, but assume that the term "sailbarrow" being so general applies to any wheelbarrow having a sail. The historic precedent of the Chinese incarnation is literally their conventional wheelbarrow with a sail added.

I assume the same approach can be (and probably has been) used on any wheelbarrow in appropriate conditions.

Haha, when riding my bike downwind, I'd sometimes open my jacket wide and let the wind do the work.

For examples, see https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-wheelbar...

Aren't Llamas South American mountain animals?

Were they really walking around the tropical jungles of Mexico?

Mayans traded via boat with South America. They had a pretty good idea what existed down there.

You're right that Llamas are South American (though they weren't always - the fossil record shows Llama-like animals as far north as the southern states ~20K years ago), but mexico is so much more than just tropical jungles! Some parts see snow every year, and there are piles of mountains all over the country. It's such an incredible place.

The hard thing isn't the wheel, it's the axle. For that, you need a precision that it's difficult to get without at least bronze tools.

Yeah, to add to your comment, this link has some more detailed explanations regarding the wheel+axle combo: https://www.livescience.com/18808-invention-wheel.html

It is also worth pondering why wheel+axle was invented so late even in Eurasia (after bronze alloys were invented and adopted, only around 5.5 kya, many thousands of years after agriculture).

This fact has changed my perspective on how much infrastructure already must exist to enable large wheels that rotate smoothly around an axis. Knowing that, it is no longer shocking that one might make toy wheels, and never scale them up to large ones.

It has been demonstrated linguistically that the Proto-Indo-Europeans had oxcarts with solid wheels. (Spokes came later.) They are estimated to have spread out over all of Europe and southern Asia sometime around 6-9 thousand years ago. Most languages in those areas trace directly to theirs. English has brought back together numerous words from various other descendants of it.

Notable exceptions from the PIE family are semitic languages, and Hungarian, Basque, and Finnish.

Then again, they had some sort of paved high-ways!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacbe

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