Before inventing the wheel, humans dragged heavy loads on an X-shaped structure of wooden poles called a travois.
Archeologists working at White Sands National Park in New Mexico may have uncovered traces of such a vehicle alongside human and mammoth footprints pressed into late Pleistocene sediments 22,000 years old.
“This unique footprint record may represent one of the earliest pieces of evidence for the use of transport technology,” the authors wrote in the journal Quaternary Science Advances in January. “Although these devices likely played vital roles in the lives of ancient peoples, they have low preservation potential in the archaeological record.”
That is because the wooden poles and twine or vines that lashed them together rotted before they could be fossilized, they wrote. The footprints and drag marks are preserved when they were filled in with sand and other sediments, which hardened over the eons into sandstone.
The scientists found adult and child footprints, sometimes cut by the dragmarks, which would be consistent with dragging their belongings behind them, they wrote. Other footprints cut across the scene as well. The entire collection was found near a well-known “trampling ground” of mammoth footprints.
Wheeled vehicles likely invented 5,500 years ago
The first wheeled vehicles were likely invented around 5,500 years ago in Mesopotamia in the Middle East, according to the Iowa State University Institute for Transportation. People liked the two-wheeled carts so much that images survive today in clay pottery and tablets- imagine getting a coffee mug with a picture of your motorcycle on it.
While the researchers found both single and parallel drag marks, they cautioned that they couldn’t rule out the possibility that some of the traces were made by dragging firewood.