Trade and Transport

Trade and Transport:

Tools like axe, scrapers and chisels enabled neolithic people to cut trees and to work on wood. Most probably round shaped pieces of wooden logs were used as wheels. Such round pieces can easily gain momentum. The neolithic people invented wheel and the technology they had developed so far, underwent a revolution. The neolithic people began to produce wheel-made pottery. The wheel technology made it possible to produce pottery on mass scale. The invention of wheel also made it possible to obtain raw material from distant places in much lesser time. It became easier to send the finished goods to distant markets where it was in more demand. It helped to develop trade and transport on a greater scale.

The place and time of an "invention" of the wheel remains unclear, because the oldest hints do not guarantee the existence of real wheeled transport, or are dated with too much scatter. The invention of the wheel has been credited to the Elamites because their sculptures are the earliest to portray it. The invention of the solid wooden disk wheel falls into the late Neolitihic and may be seen in conjunction with other technological advances that gave rise to the early Bronze Age. Early wheels were simple wooden disks with a hole for the axle. Some of the earliest wheels were made from horizontal slices of tree trunks. Because of the uneven structure of wood, a wheel made from a horizontal slice of a tree trunk will tend to be inferior to one made from rounded pieces of longitudinal boards.

The neolithic wheel might have been similar to the wheel seen here. We do not know, how old is this wheel. It appears here as an illustration, only to give some idea of a wooden wheel, made by using a round shaped piece cut from a wooden log.