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TheBattler t1_j1jorq0 wrote

Reply to comment by Type31971 in Simple/Short/Silly History Questions Saturday! by AutoModerator

>wheeled carts being drawn by humans have existed in Europe and Asia for centuries, if not millennia.

Okay but that doesn't matter when our earliest archaeological evidence for carts is often tied to cattle; the Brononice pot abstractly depicts a wagon and was found alongside the remains of an auroch. Tripolye culture toy bull is literally a bull on wheels. Evidence for carts and wagons appear in present-day Ukraine just after the introduction of cattle.

It's a boring answer but for whatever reason, humans didn't think they needed a cart until they had some other poor animal to drag it around.

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Type31971 t1_j1jxt69 wrote

Art of cattle pulling a cart doesn’t mean human-pulled carts weren’t developed at the same time or earlier. On top of that there’s no evidence that mesoamerican cultures stopped developing wheeled carts because of an absence of large domesticated draft animals. The Maya didn’t shrug their shoulders and say “This could be awesome, if only… oh well”

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TheBattler t1_j1k3y8f wrote

Yes, everybody on this sub knows the absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence...but this is to our best current knowledge.

>On top of that there’s no evidence that mesoamerican cultures stopped developing wheeled carts because of an absence of large domesticated draft animals.

If that's your standard for why they didn't develop wheeled carts, you'll basically never have a satisfactory answer. It's next to impossible to prove a negative using archaeology.

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Type31971 t1_j1k8tx2 wrote

There is never gonna be a satisfactory answer. As I said before, large swaths of the Americas were still Stone Age societies when Europeans made contact… You’d think all of continental humanity would have advanced beyond that point

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