Originally Posted by Free Indeed

How many people invented the wheel? It would "seem" logical that everyone would have invented it simultaneously, but it didn't happen that way.

"it’s easy to assume that the wheel would have simply "happened" in every culture when it reached a particular level of sophistication. However, this is not the case. The great Inca, Aztec and Maya civilizations reached an extremely high level of development, yet they never used the wheel. In fact, there is no evidence that the use of the wheel existed among native people anywhere in the Western Hemisphere until well after contact with Europeans.

Even in Europe, the wheel evolved little until the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, with the coming of the Industrial Revolution the wheel became the central component of technology, and came to be used in thousands of ways in countless..."

http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/wheel.htm

Originally Posted by Joan of Bark

I haven't read all the posts in this thread, so I apologize if someone has covered this one already.

The wheel is only useful in places where there are long stretches of hard ground. The Aztecs, Incas and Mayans lived in the jungle, where the wheel would have been useless as a means of transport.

Originally Posted by Joan of Bark

But a small cart could be pulled by humans, if there is ground on which it can be used.

Originally Posted by Casper

I take it you've never been to the region. Such terrain is plentiful.

Originally Posted by Joan of Bark

I've never seen Bolivia or central America, although I have travelled through Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil, and the only flat open land I saw was man-made (but I admit I hardly went everywhere).

But the real question is: what was the terrain like when the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas were building their civilizations?