One little trivia bit about ancient meso-America is that they independently invented the wheel, but they didn’t have beasts of burden to pull carts, so the wheel was largely used for inocuos things like kids toys. They didn’t need the wheel.
A question that still needs answering: Why didn't they use hand carts? Some of these cultures had the concept of the wheel down, like the Aztecs. Some of them even built extensive paved roads like the Maya. And the Aztec and Maya had mutual exchange through conquest. But they didn't use manpower to pull wheeled vehicles. Why not?
Yes I was going to say this trypanosomiasis in Africa is seen as a agricultural problem. It was a problem in ancient times too though - its why the major mesopontanian and Euorpean armies didn't push south over land - their horses dided.
I think the reason this question gets asked is because the wheel is the basis of so many of our other technologies, that we cannot fathom life without it. The wheel isn't just used to transport things. It's used to generate power from water, to mill wheat, to spin thread, and so on
That’s probably the only thing I as a Nigerian may regret not having the wheel earlier on for, Ie powering industry but at the same time we honestly ig did not really need it for what we used or developed, even when we knew about it the fact that we still did not use it may just mean it had no major use for us, Africa was never truly isolated so we knew about it but sadly had no real practical use for it ig.
Yeah it is, but this doesn't change the material conditions. The development of the wheel like all other developments are a direct result of material conditions and so theres no real escaping that, the wheel lead to other technologies more or less by fluke.
@@joshrivers5191 Material conditions refers to conditions and circumstances in the real world/environment, not just the availability of literal "materials" (which would probably usually be referred to more as resources in this context anyway)
Also, europeans did use camels, just not to the same extent. Environment, as in "cold" is not a reason, you can breed to aclimate, but yeah, the terrain wasn't suitable. Navigable rivers are a blessing the best, but also an obstacle.
@lloydgush environment for camels is a big reason, it's extremely expensive to breed camels for multiple generations to get one that can survive in the Temps it needs to work in, compare that to wheels and carts, something that as a principle is so easy to make and repair that ancient societies around the world made them in bulk because for inter city transport there was nothing close to as good, and when a river didn't connect cities, there was nothing close to as good for the job again.
You are confusing africa with the Americans. There are no such african wheeled toys, there are mesoamerica wheeled toys, although they did not use them for long range transportation. Thus still is deeply impressive on the part of the mesoamericans. Why? Because that would make them 1 of exactly 2 populations which ever novelly invented the wheel - the other being Mesopotamians.
One reason for the failure of the First Siege of Vienna 1529 was the breakdown of the supply chain on camelback. The siege dragged into an unusually wet October, and camels cannot stand cold wet weather.
I usually get my camels, pre-constructed. Just remember, try to avoid disassembling your camel, because if you do, the pieces never quite fit the same. Every camel I’ve ever reassembled has failed to live up to its factory assembled functionality.
People use whatever resources are available to them: in Europe trees are abundant so they developed coffee table technology. In the desert you have two main things: sand and goats. Take some goat hides and spare organs, fill with sand according to time-honored techniques, and voila, you have a camel.
With respect to adoption of the camel, Europeans already had the ass (donkey) for overland transport. From what I've read, the ass probably handles the rocky, mountainous terrain found in Europe better than camels would. So, even if camels could have adapted to the European climate, they might not have been the best option for moving goods in between the riverine transportation networks.
Horses were and are still used in mountainous areas of Europe. The Swiss and Austrian armies still use them today. Why bother with freaking camels. Horses really go well together with wheels though, so having mounts is not an excuse not to get better tech.
@@FifinatorKlon I'm one such a member of the Swiss army who uses horse to transport material. :) If you want the size of a horse and the flexibility and brain of the donkey then the usage of mules is also great. A bit less than 10% of all pack animals the Swiss military uses are mules. I never worked with camels or heard about someone who uses camels as pack animals in Switzerland. What I know is that lamas are sometimes used in the Swiss alps. Or large goats. But in the end most people who still do pack animal work use horses, mules or donkeys. A well trained horse or donkey is capable of working the field, carrying loads, being ridden, pulling tree trunks and carts. You can basically train a single animal to help you out in all your needs and don't need several animals for the various purposes. Those horses and donkeys can do the work almost independently, if trained well. For example there can be a guy loading the horse at one place and then the horse walks to some other place all on it's own and there some other guy removes the load. Of course that requires a peaceful country where people don't steal stuff or where no wolfs kill the horse along the way. ----- I just read through an article comparing the camel with the horse. The article is biased towards the camel, so it required a bit if reading between the lines. But here are my conclusions why the horse/donkey is used in Europa and not the camel. - For one the Camel is not native to Europa. I don't know how big that influence is, as the contact with camels goes back several millennia. So if the camel was noticeably superior then it would be used since the time of the Romans. - Camels can carry about twice as much as horses and they require less maintenance (food, water, medical care, hoofing...) and have more endurance over long distances. Additionally they can better deal with with harsher terrain. But they are slower than horses. But when carrying loads then horses are also slow. So from the point of view of a pack animal, horses are not really faster or more agile. Based on the stats alone one would think the camels are more suited for the alps. I think the reason why they are not used is because horses are way more flexible in their usage. Camels are more useful for the purpose of long distance material transportation, but Europa doesn't need that due to the rivers and lakes and coasts. Also the Romans created a network of roads that lasted until today. So we can use boats and carriages instead of camel caravans. Europa probably needs pack animals for way shorter distances and Europa is fertile enough, that the increased water and food consumption is not that big of a problem. And poor people who can't afford the maintenance of a horse would just use donkeys or mules or oxen as an alternative. According to what I've read camels are better than horses in rough terrain like the mountains. But they didn't mention if camels also outperform mules and donkeys. Also the horses we use are pretty good at walking on difficult hiking paths. So I don't know how big the difference is between horses and camels. Horses can be used as a fast warhorse, a hunting horse for the nobles or as a calm pulling horse for the farmer. Those horses I just listed were different breeds _(See "Medieval Misconceptions: HORSES" by Shadiversity),_ but since they are all still horses, the way to train them was pretty much the same. If you want to train camels then you would need completely different specialists. Form trainers to maintenance workers (hoofs, healthcare...). There are cases where camels would be superior to the horse, but the cultural infrastructure is already set up for horses so the additional cost of being unique makes the usage of camels too cumbersome. - Camels are more difficult to train compared to horses due to their stubbornness. I don't know how their stubbornness compares to donkeys and mules. In my experience, the mules are somewhat similar to horses, at least in the military environment. The ones I know are slightly more stubborn, but since we only use well trained animals their performance is pretty much equal. Also we don't use them long enough so that the user can really get an optimal behavior out of the animal. Theoretically horses deal better with changing owners while donkey and mules prefer a single owner. Donkeys and mules tend to observe and think so if they notice something they show it to the owner while the horse tends to either be frightened or just follow the lead into danger. The horses we use are very well trained and frightened by almost nothing, pretty much comparable to the mules we used. In the military context where we use the animals for a few months at most, the difference in character in mules and horses is pretty small. I don't know how Camels compare, but based on the article I read, they seem to be less trainable than either the horse or the mule/donkey. I guess camels would be trainable for the caravan transport, but not as an all purpose worker like the horse or the mule is. Also camels are more sensitive to hectic and noisy environments compared to the horse. Horses just need to get used to the environment and then they don't care if they are on a shooting range or in the middle of the city. ---- _Horses really go well together with wheels though, so having mounts is not an excuse not to get better tech._ Humans are lazy. They only use more advanced stuff (which comes with more maintenance), if they are forced to. In Europa they were forced to due to the environment and the feudal system. Also in the medieval times, they were under constant attack by the Muslims, and their trade routes to the east were heavily restricted by the Muslims too. And if we add to that the Greek/Roman heritage as well as the Christian mindset, that the universe follows universal laws that were given by a universal law giver, then a lot of things came together to create the industrial revolution. I do think there are biological effects that contribute how innovative a society is. But this is probably a small factor while geography, ideology and political structures are the bigger influence. Also there is the thing that invention happened all around the globe in all cultures. The question is not if something got invented but if it is applied by the common folk in society. That is the point of when technology really gets an improvement. Or in short, yes, having mounts is not an excuse to not get better tech, but we need to be motivated to invent stuff and then apply those inventions in the daily life. ---- I hope you don't mind that I wrote a small novel. I got curious why the camel wasn't used in Europa and followed the rabbit hole. And writing down the thoughts helps me formulate my thoughts. So I just used this comment as a thinking help.
@@FifinatorKlonCamels can carry greater loads, move greater distances without stopping, and consume fewer resources than horses, they are superior pack animals by almost every metric
I remember the factoid that outside of 50 km of a navigable river or the coast, prior to the invention of railways, it wasn't economical for farmers to produce above a subsistence level, since the costs of fodder for their carts would kill their profits.
unfortunately that was on a hard drive of mine which crashed early in pandemic and I failed to think of taking it to my local white box guy in time as it caused me a surge of depressive and somewhat delusional symptoms
@@gfuentes8449 I can't cite the guy but it was a theory of why French agriculture developed where it did during the Enlightenment. The peasants who actually had carts were the better-off ones.
Early British colonial Australia imported camels and their drivers from elsewhere (the Ghan train from Adelaide to Darwin North South is named after British colonial Afghanistanian cameleers but many from colonial India) to solve the problem of transport into the interior of arid Australia before they could build railways and roads. There are now large numbers of non-native feral camels in Australia.
We have so many feral animals! Donkeys! Foxes! Rabbits! Cats people let out! Even the majestic Snowy Mountain wildhorses are technically invasive pests!
It's also easy to forget that, until maybe 150 years ago, many (smaller) loads were carried by other means even where transport on wheels would have been possible. I know that in my mother's rural German village, in the 19th century, there were of course carts and wagons which farmers used for big loads like harvest, hay, wood or a sheep pen. However. Draft animals were valuable and expensive, so was the extra food (oats). Also, not everybody who did agriculture had proper draft animals. Small farmers had to borrow animals from richer neighbours, or use a cow, and they wouldn't do that to their poor cow to draw stuff they could carry themselves (also they still wanted that cow to have calves and produce some milk!) Market products like eggs, butter, fruit and vegetables were carried to town (several hours away) on the heads of the women who sold them. Carrying stuff on the head seems to be an African thing today, but 200 years ago it was common in many rural regions. Even donkeys were still used to transport stuff like sacks of grain / flour to the miller and back.
This is something a lot of people forget, is that for millenia, keeping a horse is something really expensive that only few could maintain. Much more a carriage
@@Maritimesgestein Handcarts aren't that useful when there isn't the infrastructure (roads) to use them, or the capacity to cheaply produce and maintain good wheels. Domestic animals, on the other hand, grow by themselves, self-repair, and deal with rough and/or muddy terrain relatively easily.
@@Maritimesgestein Handcarts aren't as free as your own hands. If you really have something too heavy to carry, borrowing a donkey might still be cheaper.
I'm from Madagascar and here, during the pre colonial era, some people were already aware of wheels. The nobility who ruled over the central highlands actually avoided it as much as they can. The main reason is that by adopting wheels and so transport with wheels, adapted roads would have to be built. The highlands were surrounded by large hills and was a mountainous area, which meant accessing it would be difficult. The nobility saw it as a military advantage as it would make it more complicated for invaders to reach the capital. Along with jungles and dense forests which were infested by mosquitoes that could cause malaria, it was deemed an effective natural protection against invaders. Building roads adapted for wheels would mean that a stronger army could easily reach the capital (like the french). As far as I'm aware of, that was one reason why wheels were not adopted even when they have already witnessed other people using it.
Reminds me of the time Cyrus built a road all the way to the Hellespont and after a failed attack on Greece, Alexander followed the road all the way back to Persepolis and the rest is history.
@@LiShuBen I thought small family camelers had died out since they invented assembly line constructed camels. I work as a hump assembler in the camel factory and in 6 months I've got a promotion to become senior hoof polisher
@@MittiMaten movin up, nice. And nice to hear that there are still some small family owned camel comp.s that stand by the quality of their craft. The big camel industry camels die on me pretty fast. I wanna switch and support a local supplier, but what can I say can't beat those prices. Slave to the capitalist game smh.
These days, cameling really is artisanal - the days of prêt à porter camels are long-since passed. Times were - back in the 1980s - that you could go to Target on your way to the pub, and pick up an 87R camel (or dromedary). I think the entire industry got ruined by the reduction in tariffs in the 1990s, which eviscerated the industry. Also, camel-abuse was absolutely *rife* back then. People would go to the SS&A Club (mostly to pick up), then they would always take in a couple of Bactrian-v-Dromedary showdowns that were put on in the car-park by local gypsies. Maybe the 1980s were different in Wodonga, but that's unlikely. These days, you really want to ensure that you're getting a fair-trade free-range camel - preferable with a USB-C port (so that they can be recharged: the old micro-USB ones were a pain because you had to have the charger cord up the right way).
Wheels aren't only useful when you have draft animals. Human pulled hand carts and wheel barrows are very useful and were used in ancient times. They would certainly have had uses is southern Africa.
Africa has plenty of potential draft animals, Africans never domesticated them because of low genetic IQ potential. This entire video is just an excuse to ignore the actual detail no one wants to address, like so much other modern "social science"
@@gobomanaga5615which ones? Zebras? Zebras are ultra aggressive and persecuted. Horses? Horses aren't native to western/southern/central africa but were available in north-eastern Africa and the Sahel (only camels). And they were quite useful for Ethiopians (Abyssinian horse), Somalis (camels and pony) and Nubians (Horses and camels)
@@RibeiroGames12 You don't need a continent or country-spanning system of interconnected roads, you simply need flat level terrain maintained within and around a city, town or village. Wheels are still a massive local efficiency increase for hauling goods about town! The wheel does not require the existence of draft animals or paved roads connecting major cities: just a civilization with the idea to make them, and the minimal capacity to make them useful (ie maintaining local thoroughfares). The efficiency increases were seen as small enough that it never caught on as a useful idea (if the idea to use wheels that way occurred at all), maybe. That's fine! There's no harm in that being the case, really. Different priorities, or just bad luck. Bicycles weren't invented until the 19th century, and they are a massively efficient technology that operates on chains and gears and wheels - all ancient tech. Sometimes a really great idea just doesn't materialize for a few hundred/thousand years for no particular reason beyond "the thought never occurred to us to use this idea like that before now".
There's a kind of gross colonial paternalism in attempting to explain why the natives of certain places understandably couldn't/wouldn't have wheels. It reeks of accepting the premise that inventing and using the wheel is uniquely important, and then looks for ways to explain why groups who didn't do so are "just as smart" despite that fact. We should just accept that "Hey, they can be just as smart either way. Sometimes a good idea just... doesn't happen, and/or doesn't take off." Romans should have had bicycles. They didn't.
@@rushi5638We know for a fact that they are not as smart. It is Genetic, this has been proven in thousands of IQ studies, and Twin studies proving that it is the case irrelevant of rearing. The Social Sciences are attached at the hip to neomarxism and refuse this fact because it allows them to spread the ideology of the oppressor and the oppressed(because when you remove IQ there must be *SOME* reason why africans do so poorly in modern society) Like a doctor refusing you medicine so that he can give you his own proprietary treatment. "Romans should have bicycles" No, they shouldn't. They had horses and didn't have a way to mass manufacture the parts required for a bike chain and socket system which would make it viable in cost compared to a horse.
The sign is a subtle joke. The shop is called "Sneed's Feed & Seed", where "feed" and "seed" both end in the sound "-eed", thus rhyming with the name of the owner, Sneed. The sign says that the shop was "Formerly Chuck's", implying that the two words beginning with "F" and "S" would have ended with "-uck", rhyming with "Chuck". So, when Chuck owned the shop, it would have been called "Chuck's Feeduck and Seeduck".
Bull shit. You didn't know that having women transport goods by placing them in baskets on top of their heads is the most efficient way? You must be racist.
A wheelbarrow is more of an expensive afterthought. It doesn’t cost as much when you already have an industry of making carriages and carts and all sorts of things going. But in isolation how many cultures used wheelbarrows when they couldn’t use carriages at all?
I recently visited Hawaii and went to a sacred historical site (Pu'uhonua O Honaunau National Historical Park). The park ranger there gave a talk about the native Hawaiians, and touched on the fact that they didn't use any wheeled vehicle for transportation. He pointed out how many people equate that to a lack of technological innovation, but then pointed all around to the landscape around him and was like "do you really think it would be smart to try to wheel a cart over these jagged lava rocks?" They just used canoes instead.
Well that's a fairly stupid response actually. Plenty of civilizations indigenous to unideal geographical locations adopted the wheel throughout history and got on just fine with it.
@@patavinity1262 You must not have ever visited Hawaii. It's unfeasible even for modern cars to navigate most of the landscape. It's miles and miles of wildly uneven jagged lava rock that even bulldozers struggle to break up.
why would they put their villages on jagged lava rocks? Their villages were in low lands, where wagons or wheel barrels would be beyond helpful. Transporting goods by waterways, and transfering hundreds of pounds of goods from the canoe to a wagon or wheel barrel pushed and or pulled by a few, is much better than having to have the whole tribe carry it on their backs.
@@logarhythmic6859 I *have* visited Hawaii as a matter of fact - my mother is Hawaiian and I've spent a lot of time there. In fact I think it's clear I know the landscape better than you - there are many areas with even ground and which are entirely navigable using wheeled vehicles. If TH-cam allowed me to do so, I'd post images of Hawaii to demonstrate this point, but you can easily see for yourself by searching online. The geography of Hawaii is in fact, unsurprisingly, not entirely consistent everywhere on the islands. There are perhaps areas of 'wildly uneven jagged lava rock' but that by no means characterizes the entirety of the landscape. The newer, outer parts of the island will naturally be rockier, while further inland the terrain is smoother - that this is the case is obvious if you think about it, as rocks erode away and soil builds up with time. Where my family live, south-west of Hilo (which is not even that far from the shore), it is nothing like what you describe. There are certainly rock formations around, but nothing that would make wheels impossible to use. The steepness of some of the slopes in Hawaii and the vegetation would have been far more important obstacles than rocks but these are not insurmountable either. In various parts of Hawaii there are expansive ranches where the forests have been cut down - rolling grassland without any rocks at all. And even where there *are* a lot of rocks, it would still generally be quite possible to navigate with a large-wheeled wagon even where it is not possible with a small-wheeled car. As the other commenter noted, your explanation also doesn't take into account the fact that canoes may be ideal for transporting things from one part of the shore to another, it's not going to help you if you live in the middle of one of the islands. A much better explanation for the Hawaiians' not having used wheels becomes apparent if you look at the example of Peru - wheeled childrens' toys have been discovered which were made by the Incas, proving they understood the principle of the wheel. So why no large wheeled vehicles? Because unlike in ancient Mesopotamia, for example, they didn't have any large animals to harness such vehicles to, and so didn't build any. The same goes for the native Hawaiians - the largest animals they had were pigs.
Maybe Europe did not go for the camel because the Roman Empire created a surfaced road network at least in the Mediterranean Basin. Makes it easier to use wheeled transport.
@@david7384it's superior once you have powerful states that can build roads in favorable environments. Wheels, again, lack much viability without pack animals or smooth plains. They're pretty much useless in dense jungle.
If we're talking about dromedary camels they basically can't even live year-round in temperate zones, it actually created logistical problems for the Muslims during the Arab conquests as they drove further north. Bactrian (two-humped) can endure temperate zones so was popularly used along the silk road but I'm guessing they were just never raised in great numbers in eastern europe so western europe wouldn't have a nearby source to start with.
You focused just on transportation, whereas in other areas of human activity wheels were also used. For example, in windmills or mechanical devices of many kinds.
We also don't use canals to carry firewood a few hundred feet, but we sure as heck will use a wheel on a frame, or a couple of wheels. OP is just being obtuse.
Pretty much everything in modern civilization requires a wheel to exist. People that just think about vehicles when a wheel comes to mind are just idiots. Just like people that protest the use of crude oil without understanding that everything they use to protest said oil is produced using crude oil.
@@ukaszangowski536 hes most likely joking (I hope)... because we didnt need camels. the wheel was invented in Mesopotamia. we just applyed that invention and used it in correct way 😅 camels can tow a WHEELED vehicles. like a horse. just that camel has advantage in DRY ENVIRONMENT and HORSE got advantage in power. thats all.
@@bambino_88horses cannot carry more than a camel, and camels are just as fast over distance. Camels are also quite capable of surviving in European climates with minimal extra care versus horses. European horses were also small - we call them ponies today. It wasn't until the great big horses from the middle east were taken to Europe that the horse as you're imagining it became a thing in Europe. The bottom line is: horses are not better than camels, they aren't even better in European terrain! They definitely wouldn't have been a better option than a camel back then either.
I had researched this subject within the past year or so, and learned about the zones where the tseotse fly attacks the equine population. However in the Northern Sahel region bordering the sahara, the horse culture of the Hausa people does thrive. Also in Ethiopia, horses were used by the nobility to some extent during the latter centuries.
Well, yeah, but he's talking about wheeled vehicles. The Egyptians used chariots (an idea borrowed from the Hittites) but only for war or the transport of elite persons....why? Horses are expensive to feed and despite what many people think, are not good endurance animals, so not really good for pulling wagons over long distances (that's why when used the teams have to be changed regularly.) Additionally, just try driving a cart through sand.
@@RationalP And yet, if a human and horse were to race across the US, the human would win, as humans can cover more ground for more hours on a daily basis. Yes, horses are adapted for running (duh) but they only need to run far enough and fast enough to out-distance their predators. Humans hunted horses for millenia just as other herbivores are hunted today, by the exhaustion method. I like horses, but they're not super-creatures, and most of what's shown in movies amounts to animal abuse. You gallop a horse flat out for hours and you'll have a dead horse.
The tropical rain forests of central Africa, the Amazon and the Andes were and still are fully covered with trees. In those conditions roads for carts were not (are not) used for several reasons: 1. The forests would re-take (grow over) the road very fast. It rains a lot so carts would get stalk. People walked (and still does) along paths in the forests and use rivers (canoas). In the high Andes of Perú and Bolivia, people used, and still use, lamas (same genera as camels). Of course they know carts and wheels but lamas are “better”, less costly, more efficient for the topography. Lamas, like camels do no need roads to be built and maintained.
@@hez859 China experiences large typhoons and catastrophic floods. India also experiences monsoon rains yet implemented chariots over time since 1500 BCE. Sometimes a civilization (Bantu or Atzlan) miss a key innovation. Just like the Americans walked on the moon and not the British. The Chinese also missed vital innovations in gunpowder weapons, despite inventing it.
@@danielradu3212you are mentioning two civilizations bordering with other civilizations with drastically different climate conditions. Chinese never could get into Vietnam and into those deep jungles, and egyptians were mostly Mediterranean technologically so they had to keep chariots for war. Also, their climate was good enough for agriculture and keeping horses along with camels
Reminds me of why the wheel was not adopted in the Americas except in limited numbers. Its a common misconception that nobody ever had the inventive spark and thought of the idea of the wheel but that is not true. In the mountainous areas in say the South American mountain ranges the wheel is ill suited as its too dangerous when you do not have modern braking systems because when going downhill you have to spend all over your energy to prevent the load your are carrying behind you from running you right over or worse. They did have wheels on things like children's toys so they had certainly thought of it but had to use options better suited for the local environment. similar story with North America, The wheel just gets stuck in the mud unless you build a well irrigated Roman road wherever you want to go.
Wheels are used for more than transportation that requires brakes. Why didn’t any of these people use a wheelbarrow, the easiest way for a person to move heavy things by themselves? Also having something on a toy doesn’t mean you can grasp the full extent of its use. The Greeks made toys that used steam pressure to move, that doesn’t mean they could have made a steam engine.
@@chariotrider9716 they probably didn’t need a wheelbarrow or perhaps they were made and just got erased by history since they would have decayed by now.
@@chariotrider9716the andean people didn't have horses at the time so they used lhamas to carry extra weight around and a system of mountainous roads that connected Cusco to Ecuador and several other cities, they had corn and potatoes that could easily grow so no need to overcomplicate irrigation, they had armors, weapons, great monuments and cities, they developed mathematical formulas and early forms of writing, if they had horses maybe they would have made a greater use of whells but at the time it was basically useless
I think you should amend your title to, Why precolonial Africa didn't have the wheel FOR TRANSPORT. When I hear the word wheel, used as you present it I think of transport yes, but also water wheels, windmills and mechanical motor mixers. Or even the simple karum. So, I think a more through question is, did Africa use the wheel in any capacity?
@@joe18750 What is a chariot? There were carts used to unload goods from the coast and transport in markets across the horn and North Africa... sure niger-congo speaking regions have a different climate with dense vegetation and rainy seasons that make it useless. However that's not all of africa so the title is ridiculous but you're very right in limiting a wheel to just transport is very silly since it was used for processing grains and pottery even in those regions that didn't use it for transport
Sub Sahara Africans didn't travel much and they didn't have to transport much, those by a body of water used the water but it still didn't require large boats, that's one reason most tribes and such remained untouched, Sahara Africans had to keep traveling to survive and trade was their hussle, camel is great for this.
Yeah that's reasonable, although that was the original use case of the wheel and axle was wheeled transport. The wheel as in the potters wheel - which predated it, was fairly spread in eurasia but not used in African and native American pottery. This implies it's use in this form was simply less mobile. Ditto with the pulley
You're ignoring all the European uses of the wheel besides long range transport. E.G. hand and donkey carts, windmills, watermills, spinning wheels, the potter's wheel, flywheels for operating construction cranes, etc.
I think another interesting thing to point out is that the wheel and axl was not a widespread invention but appeared to have been invented once in Eurasia and spread around. Outside of that we can't find much evidence of cultures anywhere independently making the wheel and axle. Plenty of cultures have toys and small constructions showing that a concept of the wheel existed, but the wheel and axle as a form of transport seems to have been a very unique spark of genius.
@@skp8748 You get that we´re talking thousands of years earlier, do you?' First time "italians" visited somalia was when the roman empire owned egypt. And people had chariots long before the romans.
That said, it's one of those things, that finding evidence for isn't especially easy. Most of what we know about ancient wheeled vehicles such as chariots, comes from people talking/writing about them. It's definitely possible that they were more widespread than we realise. Indeed it is possible some cultures adopted then abandoned the wheel at some stage or other. There's a lot of proverbial, and literal mud between us and the whole picture.
Apparently both the Ethiopian Highlands and the Somali peninsula used the wheel. The Ethiopian Highlands had/have rain-fed agriculture and an abundance of livestock, including horses.
Not surprised. The Horn of Africa is ancient and had long standing ties & relations with many parts of the world unlike the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa, tbh they shouldn’t even be apart of that “category”
@Patriarch.Chadimus get over colonial imposed African history and propaganda. The Great Wall of Benin is second to that of China. Great Zimbabwe. Adams Calendar is the only ancient accurate Celestial alignment and observatory recorded history.
But people don't just use wheeled vehicles for long-range transport, there were plenty of carts used to carry goods around town. It's a little silly to say Europeans disfavored the wheel because they had rivers. Also I am not sure your arguments about cost etc. hold true for a small handcart.
Yeah this isn't his best video. Seems convoluted, like trying to shoehorn history into a modern sociological view. Or perhaps just big opinions developed by someone with a small store of practical experience to draw from (tho, sincerely, a delightful surplus of "book learnin"). The basic use case for the wheel is not transport at all, as we conceive that industry. It's wheelbarrows and dollies--that is, materials handling. Building on even the smallest scale is a lot less fun if you lack a wheelbarrow. If indeed Sub-Saharan Africans didn't use wheelbarrows and dollies, then I think the true explanation might have something more to do with a surfeit of human labor. Wheelbarrows and dollies--and indeed proper transportation vehicles--are work multipliers: they allow a lone individual (or a teamster) to do much more work than he could do without the machine. Perhaps the Sub-Saharan Africans, when there was work to be done, all pitched in as a village. Or perhaps projects were only directed by leaders with plenty of subordinates. The only time you'd have a project but wouldn't care to have a wheelbarrow is if you've got strong-backed youths by the dozen at your beck and call and no better use for their time. You don't need work multipliers if there's plenty of hands to the work. Exploring these paths could make a fascination investigation into any culture's view of what work is desirable? and what is the worth of people's time? and what might they do instead if not this work? I'd guess it comes back to winter: you don't really need work multipliers if winter ain't a-comin. But if winter is coming, then you're always runnin scared that you won't have done enough to make it through. And you can't so easily call the neighbors to come help you get ahead of your problem, because their family is working feverishly at solving the same problem.
I've seen conflicting things regarding the cost of labor in precolonial Africa. Some scholars think labor was expensive, and others think it was cheap. About wheelbarrows as work multipliers -- I don't know about Africa, but in the Middle East up until maybe a century ago they didn't use wheelbarrows either. Instead they'd have two guys carry a load like a stretcher. How would that affect efficiency? I could be wrong, but I imagine that just means you need two guys to move something around the job site instead of one, without affecting the labor cost of the rest of the project. In precolonial Africa we're not talking about modern construction projects where time is money. These were villages with often large family and clan units that pooled their resources. Also, the population size generally didn't change much, so not a lot of demand for new construction. You build the houses, granary, etc. once and then use it for a hundred years.
Well I think it's a powerful data point that labor was cheap, if indeed precolonial Sub-Saharan Africans eschewed viable work multipliers after learning of them. (Tho there may of course exist subtle dichotomies, like 'all intensive labor (construction, agriculture, long-distance trade) was directed by community leaders, who enjoyed such heady authority that, to them, everything was cheap, while to the ordinary person, perhaps, hired labor was virtually unobtainable, owing to the many projects of the leader.') I think there are not so many places on earth where, when labor is dear, a wheelbarrow wouldn't be a big advantage: in very soft ground, bogs or sand, and in broken ground, strewn with big rocks or gullies, and in ground so mountainous, so lacking level spots, that homesteads are built on steep hillsides. These exclusions would presumably account for some (perhaps much) of the mideast, where you say they used two-man stretchers in place of wheelbarrows. Fair enough. One-man (or draught-animal-powered) versions of a stretcher are the sled and the travois. Having carried innumerable trays and dragged sleds, I tell you with confidence: Dude. Wheels are sweet. Which brings me back toward my point: that rejecting work multipliers seems to me to indicate a situation where the person directing work and the person doing that work are not the same person, and there is a great gulf fixed between those two persons, so that the laborer, who naturally thinks all day long, while mutely portering, sweat pouring from brow, about how to make the work go easier, was not in position to effect innovation. As to your mention of stable populations and long-serving structures, this seems not tremendously distinct from medieval Europe, right? But I liked very much your mentioning the concept 'time is money.' The South Sea Islanders, for example, I'm given to understand, did not think time was money. They seemed to think time was something much better than money. And good on them. But the idea that time is money seems to me a thoroughly a fear-of-coming-winter-based idea, and that idea seems to be the dominant modern idea. If true, interesting that one of the main exports of Europeans to their colonies was (knowingly or unknowingly, artificial) fear of winter. Thanks for discussing.
I would also argue that there were/are fewer selective pressures in these regions. When the weather is good enough to have livestock and pick fruit from trees year-round, you have less need for grain. Grain was useful because after grinding it with a wheel, it could be stored over winter months when food was less available. Shelters also had to be more advanced technologies to keep you and your livestock warm half the year. This lead to more advanced stoves and a pressure to discover more energy-dense fuels. Energy-dense fuels were integral to the industrial revolution, and the engine is basically a very complex stove. Necessity is the mother of invention. When food availability is "good enough," there's no need to develop these technologies
Very interesting video! I'll add the tentative of introducing the camel transportation in Brazil through the arid areas of northeast. Brazil's emperor Peter II went to a huge trip to the middle east during the end of XIXth century and came back with camels to be introduced in Brazil. The idea wasn't crazy, because northeastern Brazil was very dry, had only low and rough vegetation and no roads at all. Eventually there was lots of difficulties that made this not possible. It was hard to communicate with the Egyptians that came along, they were homesick, camels didn't reproduce as it was expected and locals thought the animals were too difficult to train and to manage compared to donkeys.
It's a Brazilian thing. (Can confirm as a Brazilian myself.) Not really sure why, since it just makes teaching kids more confusing, but I was indeed taught that way in school.
What about wheelbarrows and hand-carts? I can understand their absence from non-agricultural regions, but they certainly don't need roads or animals to be useful. Just not as long distance transport.
The comments are from people who have no arguments against the historical facts in this video. Ironically, their statements of "cope" is in fact a coping mechanism on their part. Unfortunately, they're just too dumb to realize it.
It's a feedback loop - there's no reason to maintain manicured flat roads if you're not using wheeled vehicles, and there's no reason to use wheeled vehicles if you don't have manicured flat roads.
Okay, so wheels weren't used on wagons etc. to travel because of things you mentioned but what about short distance heavy lifting on like wheelbarrow or a crane system with wheel pulley thingy? I imagine if there were any sort of large scale construction things like that would be great. If you talked about then I missed it and I'm sorry 😅
Pottery and toys and watermills also have wheels in them. And at least when it comes to pottery then the channel owner replied to a comment that sub-Saharan Africa didn't have it. If wheels weren't used for simple stuff like wagons and pottery then they were definitely not used for more complex stuff like cranes and windmills.
@@malachi-Exactly, that's why you two geniuses completely missed the point. It's not about camels specifically, it's about pack animals being a better fit than pulled carts in certain situations.
“So why didn’t Europeans adapt to using *superior technology* like the camel?” Great question. I often wonder why the Apollo moon missions used inefficient rocket fuel as opposed to the proven and efficient method of burning coal
I have the plugin that shows dislikes and I'm frankly perplexed at the ratio I'm seeing. This is clearly a well researched piece with sources provided and no strong opinions that could invite disagreement. You even went so far as to encourage corrections and more in-depth knowledge from specialists in African history. Regardless, thank you as always for your explorations of topics that pique your interest.
And he used the arguments which racists liked to use to discredit africans on the european sites. I strongly suspect they really didn't like that.😂😂 The truth that we all are just humans, for better or worst, is quite a hindrance for people, who take their only possible way of claiming pride, in a false sense of racial superiority. 😂😂😂😂 PATHETIC🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
They did not lack archery, they did have written language and while I don't know about multi-story buildings, they did have at least two-story buildings. (I am not native speaker so I assume by archery you mean bow and arrow, which they obviously had).
@@JackAubreyy as far as I know gunpowder was used since after the end of 16th century. Maybe you don't know but Kanem-Bornu empire already had gunpowder at 16th century, and other african kingdoms adopted it since then. You should study a bit more.
@@JackAubreyy and two-story buildings are not impressive but idk why there are some comments bringing specifically that sub-saharan Africa never had any two-story buildings. So if not impressive, idk why they bring it up
@@dann_mrtins cannibals that we jump started from the Neolithic age to the post industrial. No wonder they cause so many problems, they never had to develop anything themselves because they were incapable of doing so. Go read the British first encounter accounts and tell me they had grand civilizations.
What happened in parts of India where they did not use the wheel or a camel? Is this just a area left bare by the map? Or was it a scenario similar to Africa where conditions prohibited the use of both?
I left it off because of my own ignorance. The wheel was definitely used in India. I just don't know if they also used water transport extensively (outside of Bengal, where I'm confident water transport was king), so I wasn't prepared to go out on a limb and say they used wheeled transport primarily or in combination with water. For all I know they may have used wheeled transport exclusively, in which case I couldn't color it blue on the map. Although I'm pretty sure head porterage was also a thing there.
@@premodernist_history this is the only angle you didn't really cover, namely the importance of water transport in Europe and the Near East as well. Even today most goods are still transported by sea, it was always the case before, except in premodern times the rivers and coastlines were main arteries for trade. The Congo, Nile, Swahili coast, etc
India has elephants, and also used donkeys in the smaller parts for load transport, however royalty and richer individuals often used carts as there were basic roads built as well. water canals were definitely used in perennial canals in the south, and during th emonsoon as well@@premodernist_history
it's pretty silly to compare with water based travel because even in our modern era most transport is still done by water, the scale is just orders of magnitude greater the U.S. army ended up changing from horse to truck even though horses still had better cross country ability you could also point out that even in the middle ages they had the Roman road network to work with
Exactly. By tonnage, sure water transport far exceeds ground transport and probably always will. But that still doesn't explain all of the small human scale movements of goods that are required on a day to day basis. Most people aren't perfectly adjacent to a navigable water source. Maybe it is simply that Africans never domesticated their local animals. Cows, camels, and goats were relatively recent additions. Without decently productive agriculture and animal husbandry, you don't get the excess resources necessary for tradesman to develop crafts such as metallurgy and carpentry. Good luck building something as simple as a wheelbarrow without a smith and a carpenter.
@@marshallscot As mentioned in the video, some parts of Africa without the tsetse fly did actually have people with domesticated animals, but wheels aren't really necessary to move something that can move itself. Most of these sorts of people were nomadic pastoralists moving their herds from pasture to pasture.
@@yee2631 That sounds a lot like the Eurasian steppe herders who did use horse carts, and later on chariots. Maybe the difference was that they lived in the wagons at some point? Or as the guy above pointed out, was it their unusual access to metallurgy? Most pastoral cultures (I think) were not advanced in metallurgy.
@@KanadMondal I'm by no means an expert on that subject, but chariots were mostly used for warfare among ancient eurasian steppe cultures as far as I'm aware, and perhaps the most notable example of this would be the Yamnaya culture (who are often associated with early proto-indo-european culture). The thing is, the Yamnaya culture almost certainly didn't invent this technology themselves and probably learned it from another culture which likely learned it from another prior to that. The wheel, as it was used across most of eurasia, was not invented independently for the most part, at least not very often as far as I know, and largely radiated out from the middle east before being innovated upon further by other cultures. The poster above me metioned metallurgy as a possible factor in the development of wheels, but the earliest archeological examples of wheeled vehicles (like chariots) that we have are entirely wooden. It was only later with other cultures, such as early celtic cultures in europe, that metal rims were added to the wheels of wagons, chariots, and other early vehicles.
@@yee2631 So, the Yamnaya culture never had chariots, the Sintashta culture, a much later Indo-Iranian group in Central Asia invented them. The Yamnaya, as far as I am aware, sometimes lived in wagons, which were not really the same. By metallurgy maybe not its incorporation into the wheels themselves was meant, but the creation of the tools to make accurate spoked wheels. As for that, obviously the wheel wasn't just invented by one group, but the spoked wheel I think was, if not unique, then characteristic of PIE groups. I remember hearing that it is unusual for steppe cultures to be metallurgically advanced, which I thought might be the exception to make the difference in wheels. Besides that, the people for the Eurasian steppes, IE or not, were very warlike. The Sahara and other more plain areas in Africa are also not really steppes, so there could be a difference there. I wasn't really pointing to anything in particular, but just spewing out a bunch of factors that may influence the development of the wheel and variants of it or its omission from transport altogether. I heard someone suggest that the PIE may have learned of the wheel from them Middle East, too, owing to their CHG ancestry. While I am unsure of the time period for that one, it would explain why the Native Americans did not use the wheel by default even though they spring off from the Ancient North Eurasians.
Top notch. I know it's good because of all the colonial coping in the comments. When the top comments clearly did not watch the video I know the content must be impactful, and that's exactly what I found. Simple, concise, easy to understand, and obvious
it’s because our culture is derived from wheeled cultures and yee oldie historians believed that their culture was superior so more emphasis is placed upon the invention of the wheel.
I love that you asked people to correct you at the end so that we can all learn! Question: Why wasn't the potter's wheel adopted in Sub-Saharan Africa? (Or was it? I looked but couldn't find any information.) I've heard the lack of draft animals explanation before, and it makes sense for the transport wheel. However, you don't need draft animals to make good use of the wheel for pottery - just your hands +/- feet.
I wasn't able to find anything either, so I can only speculate. I guess there are probably two advantages to a pottery wheel: You can produce certain forms that aren't possible otherwise, and you can produce at speed. If a community isn't making large quantities of pottery and already has a certain style they like, then the pottery wheel might not seem worth it. I suspect the areas that adopted the pottery wheel were areas of higher population, leading to cities and division of labor (e.g. Mesopotamia, India, China). A machine that allows one to mass produce pottery would make sense there because of the increased demand for pots. In a small village without a complex urbanized economy, the advantages of a pottery wheel might not be fully utilized.
@@premodernist_history Pottery was discovered and subsequently abandoned many times before there was agriculture, since paleolithic people were nomads and didn't need to store anything. It became very important in places like the middle east once the neolithic revolution happened and people became sedentary. Ceramic pots were used to store grain and other food items and having a large pottery industry became economically viable. But ceramic pots weren't the only available technology for storage. For example, the mediterranean world used to store wine/beer in large pottery jugs, before the romans expanded into Gaul and learned of the gaullish use of wooden barrels for such needs, and that became the preferred storage method since then.
Every individual community made their own pottery (if they used it), and the low need for pots kept innovative ideas for the process on the back burner.
There were two-story buildings. I don't know much about the history of writing in Africa. I'm still a beginner in African history. Good idea for a video topic though.
These can help you in the meantime, Charles. There were written languages as well as two-story buildings (as if that is even meaningful): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_systems_of_Africa en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Africa
@@NanakiRowan literally al of the languages you presented refer to north africa and arab colonies. All subsharan script is colonial or post-colonial. Why are you lying like this?
@@EpicFilip I'm sorry, but Nsibidi was developed in Nigeria, which is sub-Saharan Africa. I'm also sorry that Ge'ez was developed in the Horn of Africa, which is also sub-Saharan Africa, by Ethiopians. I'm truly sorry that Adinkra was developed by Ghanaians in Ghana, which is sub-Saharan Africa. I'm even *more* sorry that Lusona was developed in Angola, which is sub-Saharan Africa. Also, whether or not any other languages were developed during colonial or post-colonial times is irrelevant, as they still were developed by sub-Saharan Africans and not by anyone else. I think that instead of lying about history, you should find a better coping mechanism, darling.
Before you read this, I am NOT an africanist nor am I an expert on the subject, not all of my information may necessarily be correct so don't take it all as 100% factual. That said, I do read about and take an interest in Africa and do generally take notice in some misconceptions others may not. I feel your video is based upon a flawed premise. To broadly state that africa south of the sahara did not utilize the wheel prior to European colonization would be false as there were places such as Mali that have evidence of the existence of the wheel as well as places such as Ethiopia. Granted, the former, Mali, is similar to the Mayans as I specifically refer to the usage of wheels on toys. What this suggests is that the idea of the wheel was not foreign to them. It would instead be more accurate to ask why the wheel was not widespread in precolonial africa which likely, at least in part, boils down to a lack of domesticable animals as a result of Tse Tse flies in parts of Central Africa, geography that I don't know enough to comment on, as well as isolation. If we are to take 'precolonial' to mean before any outside influence, that would be an arbitrary standard to specifically hold Africa to as many places and civilizations have adopted something from someone else. Its not as if everyone had jsut magically developed in a vaccum, even so called 'cradles of civiliation'. Japan was influenced quite a bit by the Chinese. Hellenic culture has much of its origins in southern europe, but also strong mediterranian and northern african influence. Not to mention the ancient history of africa itself is not exactly well studied or understood archeologically. Personally I'm not knowledgable enough on it to say for certain if they did or did not. I think you understate just how isolated parts of Central and southern africa were. There was definitely some trade contact in these parts, some chinese pots(?) were found in Makumbugwe however there wasnt any evidence of direct contact with the chinese but they were still quite isolated unlike places in the horn or parts of the sahelian region. Yes, there were most certainly parts of subsaharan africa that were less isolated, when you mention trade through the sahara, yes, they did eventually find a way to get through the sahara with the introduction of camels but this happened much later than you made it seem. In these types of discussions, people tend to get hung up on 'inventing' something, even though you can invent something and not utilize it as extensively as a group that adopts the technology. The Mayans had conception of the wheel yet did not make much usage of it, and more infamously europeans adopted gunpowder from the Chinese and arguably utilized it better at that time. I recall there may also be instances of people in parts of subsaharan africa being aware of the wheel conceptually but not having had used it, but I cannot cite a specific example for it so take that with a strong grain of salt. Ignoring this, the wheel has only truly been invented, meaning created without a prior influence or conception, a number of times. The reason I criticize your phrasing of the question is because you are essentially defending against a false premise, that precolonial africa did not have the wheel at all which may promote misunderstanding and misinformation and is often used, falsely, by some people, some with racist viewpoints, that tend to be skeptical of the environmental explanation. In my experience, they tend to underemphasize the role of trade and adopting technology in history and in some instances apply double standards, ignoring other groups of people that have been 'backwards or 'unadvanced' as if africa was the odd man out and no one else has been backwards either. I do think you were correct about the introduction of the camel as well as to how geography can play into what technologies people create or adopt. I think a video from the TH-cam 'FromNothing' on the same topic provides similar explanations and points as you do but does still acknowledge and refute the idea that Subsaharan africa did not have the wheel at all.
It's such a pity we have that evil fly... because the waterways in West Africa are quite difficult to navigate... Waaaay harder than in Europe ... Between the monsoon type seasons and relentless malaria (I've had it 10 times in my last year there) it's amazing that cities were able to develop there.... Not to mention genetic high blood pressure that kills otherwise strong & healthy adults... 🤷
You guys can’t come up with insect repellent and anti malaria medication? How is it that the west was able to come up with that after only a few centuries of being exposed to these conditions?
The question of "why didn't x use something that was better?" often has a basic, but complex, answer. "Better for what purpose, in what conditions, and with the materials available?"
@@henrydickerson9776 Ok, but what if you're taking what you're carrying from a place that's close to a river to a place that isn't close to a river? Would a wheel help then? Yes. It would. And the wheel isn't reliant on a beast of burden, not that there's any reason you can't have beasts of burden in that region. There are various animals humans have adapted to their needs. Cows, horses, dogs, pigs etc. It's like humans are these completely helpless creatures when it comes to this argument for you people. And what are roads? You have heard of roads, I assume. You can have a certain terrain but build a little lane through it that has far more convenient surface. These are arguments are a joke.
I really like your thinking and the way you frame the issue. This might be another factor. Growing up in Michigan we ran around a lot on old Native American trails. They're exactly what anyone would think they are. narrow, no foliage in the track. And humans walking on them, imagine thousands of years of soft moccasins, don't wear them down very much. Hard soled shoes? Maybe a little be more. Pigs have trotters, like hooves - very hard. If you've ever followed a trail on Santa Catalina Island off southern California you'll find these absolutely typical trails, like in any National Park or the Native trails. You'll figure out they were made and used by pigs because low hanging branches cross the trail making them difficult for humans. So foot traffic - low impact. Hiking the Wessex Trail in Dorsetshire, England, a >1000 year old path. It's generally much wider and sunken. Sunken means you are walking and to the side instead of an embankment of a slope, the pathway is cut down a meter. I figured out the difference near Nettlecombe Tout. There was a farm where I saw two teenagers on huge horses, at least as big as a Clydesdale. The trail near by that they rode on? Churned up like it had been harrowed. The thing is a wheeled cart would never have been practical on the Native American trails, most National Park trails (or the pig trails) but they'd have worked just fine in that horse trodden and eroded English trail. When I was a kid I was really good with a wheel barrow (hundreds of pounds of sloshing wet concrete, skinny 12 year old running it on a 2 x12 bridge over a trench?), and we made all kinds of devices. The only wheeled device we ever used, or thought to use on a trail - was a bicycle. Of course I eventually got a mountain bike. This makes me think another area of inquiry might be in China. They invented more types of wheel barrow than anyone else. Did they ever use them on their narrow trails?
Thanks for your comment. I would assume the Chinese used their wheelbarrows on their trails but I don't know for certain. I've been reading up on wheelbarrows for a possible future video but haven't come across the answer to that yet.
@@premodernist_history if you're doing wheel barrows perhaps also consider the travois, or the Sioux word for a one person travois: wanjiksila (different word for a dog travois and a horse travois)
Was camel ownership really that high in the sub-Sahara? Is the river always so nearby? Were natives in America and Australia also human enough not to invent the wheel? Why didn't Europeans use alpacas for main transportation?
Meso Americans had the wheel(concept and execution) based on mesoamerican toys dated back to precontact. But it wasn't used for transportation due to lack of draft animals
Natives in australia didn't invent the wheel either, and as the above commenter said, neither did the Natives Americans use wheeled transport. The wheel was invented exactly once in the old world, in either Mesopotamia or near the danube, all other human populations adopted it.
>is the river always so nearby? There is a reason the vast majority of humans live near navigable waters whether riverine or coastal, rivers were absolutely vital not just for transport but as a source of water, very few humans would live apart from a major water feature of some kind
I had recently heard the the primary use of "the wheel" in early history was for pottery instead of transport. Were pottery wheels a used tool in sub Saharan Africa? Great video, very informative.
Why would Europeans adopt the camel when they have a better alternative like horses/donkeys and mules. Which are faster easier to breed and can carry more?
As I said in the video, camels carry more. Their cruising speed is comparable to a donkey's, iirc. The people of the Middle East used carts and wagons pulled by donkeys and mules, and then they transitioned away from that to using camels as pack animals. I said that in the video.
I made a video on this exact topic a couple of years ago and I think you can gain some insight on the topic if you were to take a look. It's simply called: Why Africans Never Invented the Wheel."
I love how some people in the comments call this video "cope" without addressing ANY of the points. When they do try it is just them parroting misconceptions about African history. It reminds of how Robert Sephehr's fans response to videos that expose his lies.
No the camel is from horn Africa modern day Somalia and they also had wheeled carts and pulleys... Then again the rest of Africa is walled of by climate and geography
I remembered there was also a video stating that the Indigenous ppl in South America never used wheels. It wasn't because they were less advanced, considering that many of the toys there that their children played with had wheels(so they did come up the concept), but there was no actual way to implement it considering the terrain and other factors. They just didn't see a use for it🤷🏾♂️🤷🏾♂️🤷🏾♂️
@@pattonramming1988 also, mountains Kinda hard to find a use for carts when it'll easily roll off a cliff if you look away for a second or slip on a bit of dust
Camels and alpacas are fantastic pack animals. That's like saying there is no domesticable pack animal in Africa. Yes there is and they are called zebras
Yeah, kinda sad nobody came up with the idea of pulleys and cranes in that era, that required the development of the wheel. Or maybe they did, but they didn't find those inventions practical for what they needed.
Great video. Some things worth considering and looking into: Sleds -- humans have used sleds for a very long time. Chariots are essentially sleds with low friction skis Also, the history of the domestication of the camel through birth control is fascinating
Wheels aren't low friction, they're articulated. Even if the overall effect is similar, wheels are actually extremely high friction by design, otherwise they'd have no grip.
hello, i just discovered the video, and i don't know if my respond is gonna make it up to you. First and furmostly, i wanna say that i am not a historian, archeologist, anthropologist or anything realated, by matter of fact, i am actually all the other way, on strong sciences as a student in physics. Nonetheless, as an African, mainly from the sahel and central african regions, i think there are one or two points that you didn't take into consideration, 1 - the first point is the fact that, most of africa, till really resently and even today some villages are really but autonomous settlements, that is villages back then where small settlemen of people that where self sustained, this is again more prevalent in the central part of africa, and they mostly made exchanges of goods and gifts, bribes and or to solify bonds and create new treaties. It was colonial rule that introduced the monocrop pattern of African economies, elevated cash-crops which could be exported over food crops, thus replicating the european conditions which led to the dependency of constant exchange of goods in other words "trade". This means that, majority of african villages localy produced their sustainance, and thus there was no need for transportation of food related items. 2 - the second point that actually complement the point is that agriculture is adopted by africans very lately, either by the egyptians really latly or by the bantu which comes also relatively late. Taking into consideration that the wheel was invented with the advent of agriculture, it is not a surprise that, since agriculture was adopted relatively latly in africa, then the wheel too was most probably on his way, but taking his time. And the big issue is also the fact that the bantu region was a swanpy, mangroove region with high flooding and thick bush, this means the terain is really difficult, and impractible for such technology, reason why the european explorers really struggled to go inland. 3 - the third reason, which i think in a sense is the most important aspect, is the world view held by most african comuninties. While in other parts of the world, as in the middle east and the mediterenian region, where the phylosophycal and spiritual beliefs where "human centered" and there was a seperation between man and nature, From Genesis to Descartes, human power seems legitimate to have a hold on the planet; - “Then God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that crawl on the earth. […] God created man and woman. […] And said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living creature that moveth on the earth.” - Descartes says “to make us masters and possessors of nature”. All this, are the fundamental components of a vision of the world completely breaking with paganism: while in africa, each tree, each spring, each hill had its own genius loci, its spiritual guardian, each animal was a conscious being, and man was just as part of nature as all other beings be them plant animals or even in animate objects. Thus when the middle eastern world view would have desecrated the world and allowed the exploitation of nature and mainly animals and plants, africans would "avoid" the exploitation of nature, taking what is needed and praying the ancestors and spirits for forgiveness and guidance. i think this question in a sense is analogous to the question as to, why did some apes learn how to walk on two foots, while others not, and the response is those apes that where found in a dessertifying region had to invent a new walking method, while others who were save in forest didn't need to learn that, and perhabs it could be pointless to do so in the forest so they never really tried to. and lastly just to point out, because i have seen many people making this confusion in the comments, when we say wheels, we mean a circular object, connected at the center to a bar and that revolves on an axle and is fixed below a vehicle or other object to enable it to move easily over the ground. There where many turnable devices in africa before the wheel, but not all turnable devices are wheels, most likey many turnable devices were used, but mayhaps not in the sense of a wheel
Many ancient armies used wagons with wheels to carry the supplies. Who knows how different things would be if the romans didnt have such great supply logistics (and great capacity due to wheeled vehicles)
The main beast of burden for the Romans was the Ox, not the horse or mule. Furthermore the Romans preferred means of transport was by boat. A wagon hauled by Oxen could haul a ton of supplies, but even in Roman days, Roman Ships and Boats could haul 40 tons, over longer distances and quicker then any Ox, Horse, Mule or Camel.
yet the parthian camel logistic shreaded Crassus in Mesopotamia, with their infinite Arrow supply. Roads and Wagons are great in a moderate climate. If you face off your armys in the desert, camels are kinda op.
@@williaminnes6635 Julius Caesar preferred mules but every other Roman Army used Oxen hauling wagons (and first choice was by ship or boat). I think Caesar used mules for he relied on the Rhone and Seine rivers and it is easer to haul Mules by ship then Oxen. Caesar also crossed the Rhine (by building a bridge) and the English Channel, in both cases if ships were used (Caesar clearly use ships only crossing the Channel) it was a lot easier to get mules on and off those ships. Remember Caesar did not stay in Britain or Germany that long.
On the topic of camels not being used in Europe - actually the Ottomans brought camels to South/Eastern Europe and they were used by the villagers in my country as recently as 100 years ago, but they were slowly replaced by horses.
its most likely a jab to the europeans who make fun of black people by saying "hurr, durr, africans only slaves and mud huts.", though I can assume your average rational European would have figured that out, or be smart enough to ignore it.
There are other uses for wheels. Not just animals and vehicles. To say the development of camel tech and wheel tech are exclusive is a strange but interesting notion.
@@sama847 Classical antiquity, and later on during the Early Modern period when manufactories began being built. Although monasteries often filled this role throughout the middle ages too.
Great video - I would counter however that most transportation by cart (or at least a good deal) was historically pulled by hand (ie handcarts). The availability of domestic animals capable of pulling carts (oxen, horses, mules, etc.) Has always been limited by proximity and economic circumstance. Domestic animals are expensive to keep - they require food, shelter, and maintenance that make them valuable resources for duties to perform around a farmstead, such as plowing or powering a mill. In a given location known to have used the wheel during a chosen time period, we must ask ourselves if it would have been common for people of lesser means to even own domestic animals capable of pulling a cart. Or if they did, how often the one ox they may have kept could have been indisposed performing a separate task to that of carting around goods. We can only speculate as to how often this would have been the case, but I hope that I've made a decent enough argument that domesticated animals are not a necessary prerequisite to wheeled transportation. I would be interested to learn when and where archeological evidence of wheels/domesticated animals first emerged, and if a significant causation can be extrapolated as to the invention of the wheel being a result of said domestication.
@@lloydgush High friction factor in dragging things on top of sand. After all, the polymeric property of it is why sand blasting rust off of metal is a thing. Friction can be lowered if you water the sand first - obviously not economical for a merchant caravan traversing goods across the Sahara. That's why snow and perhaps frozen mud are the only feasible conditions for mass adoption of sleds in transportation.
Wheeled transport was invented on the southern Russian steppe by the Proto-Indo-European people who were primarily cattle and horse herding pastoralists
It's not just the wheel the African tribes lacked. they also lacked glass and hard metal tools. It could be that like the wheel, glass and hard metal tools were also overrated, though certain people would beg to differ, like those who need glasses to see.
I see a lot of comments saying that this video is cope. But I don’t see many historically based counters to the thesis. Mostly just a lot of racism. It makes me wonder who’s coping.
There is plently, you chose to ignore it. For example, how both the Africans and the Japanese adopted firearms, but only the japanese were able to counter-engineer them and produce them in a mass scale. Im sure the tse tse fly explains that too /s
@@EpicFilip that is a lie the many Sub-Saharan African states, especially in West Africa, ( Dahomey, Oyo, Benin, and Ashanti), manufactured their own guns, as well as their own gunpowder.
Not having spent 2 minutes studying African history I can tell you that any amount of weight a camel can CARRY is exponentially LESS that what it could PULL with a cart with wheels, which means less camels to feed. and problems with sinking into the sand is by remedied by making wheels that are wide instead of narrow. They didn't make wheels because they didn't have an abundance of lumber ( a fact you also need not study Africa to know.) Did you...not...think of any of this? yeash.
@@binbows2258 XD you know what, that is MY fault for trying to word that in as brief a way as possible. First, this guy is talking about specific areas of Africa and I was referencing that when saying "Africa". Second I said "abundance of lumber" Yes they have trees, but not all trees are formed of wood that is the same in density, durability, ect. For example, you wouldn't make a pillar out of Balsa wood or use spruce to carve a statue. The trees in the region he's referring to are generally thin, soft and wiry as opposed to say a pine or an oak tree. There's a reason the world gets it's lumber from areas with cold and wet environments. It's because that is the type wood that is far better suited to build or fabricate from.
I am healing from the my latest bout with Covid and found this video. Best laugh of the week when you referenced that "camels are easier to construct." (Very informative as well.)
I know it's somewhat stereotypical to think of Africa as just a massive jungle, but, in the parts that are a dense jungle, I could see wheels being problematic as well.
Europeans had horses, along with dozens of other domesticated animals that were used for a variety of purposes such as pulling the grinding wheel for a mill.
Very interesting about the tsetse fly and sleeping sickness. I was expecting you to make arguments about poor infrastucture, and how environmental, topographical and sociopolitical conditions made it more difficult to develop far-reaching and well connected road networks.
The tsetse fly was probably a big factor. Without the pulling power of large animals like cattle and horses, the usefulness of the wheel is very limited, especially in hot and wet tropical environments in which the wheel would get stuck without paved roads and animal power. Although very different, it is somewhat similar to the lack of the wheel in the Americas as they did not have access to horses or cattle to pull their heavy loads
@@nanopug Yeah I’m sure ancient Europeans could have invented vaccines back when they still believed in humors and were thought bad smells caused diseases.
@@nanopug how exactly do you fix that problem? its pretty hard to kill an entire species of fly especially if they can kill you if you interact with them too much
@@hueban1643 they did with malaria mosquito in USA such as Florida if they hadn't Americans in Florida would have been dropping off just like in western and central Africa today
Also the English were dying up to 50% in some of these places from disease and they still built the trade infrastructure they were there for. So even when disease was an issue. That was their approach.
Just want to point out the biggest difference between sub-saharan Africans and white Europeans has a lot to do with craftsmanship and I'm sure you can find fleeting examples of craftsmanship throughout sub-Saharan Africa though it will be to nowhere near the extent that Europeans have done so even before the industrial revolution this would have required ways of moving large suppliers of goods backwards and forwards as well as the ability to move finished products to market. The fact that the white man was able to create an economy facilitating the necessity of the wheel or handcart compared to the fact that the black man couldn't facilitate an economy thus rendering him inert towards the invention of the wheel.
It's true that the European economy (including North Africa) in the Middle Ages was larger than the sub-Saharan African economy. But what do you mean by Europeans being "able to create an economy" of that size? Do you mean that Africans were constrained by their environment, or do you mean the Europeans had greater intellectual capacity?
@@premodernist_history I'm stating historical fact and am trying to remain objective, I don't care much for the reasons as to the differences between the two cultures, however the evidence clearly states that there is a difference between the cultures, I will add that the only time I brought up racial differences was in reference to your claims which are starkly more racist then I think you realise when compared to the standard argument that sub-Saharan Africans filed to invent the wheel due to a low IQ. TLDR : I have no idea why Africans failed to develop active economy to the same scale as Europe, However this lack of an economy is one of the major reasons for them not inventing the wheel, There are clearly architectural differences as well as community differences all of which would have been aided by simple hand carts that the sub-Saharan Africans didn't find a need for and thus didn't invent. Side note : Europe has always been successful economically, historically this is not even disputed, particularly southern Europe of course with trade from North Africa all the way from ancient Greece, ancient Mesopotamia, the empire of Carthage, the Roman Empire, the Seleucids empire, In a lot of these time periods we have no idea what the economy was like in sub-Saharan Africa and can only work off of the assumption that it was minuscule at best, with an extremely rare number of exceptions such as ancient Ethiopia, So please leave the only in the Middle Ages argument behind, It's simply incorrect ( At best you could argue that we have a lack of data and knowledge on sub-Saharan Africans for any particular time. The lack of archaeological digs and archaeological findings would make it impossible to verify my claim ). Sorry for this being such a long post but I'm sure you can understand this is a highly sensitive subject I don't want to be misconstrued, but i hope this answers your questions.
@@JasmineTeaEnjoyer Not just talking about East Asians. All of Asia had larger economies and more craftsmen making finer objects than Europeans could. Indians, Persians, Arabs, etc. Also, I think you misspoke. East Asians wouldn't be honorary whites. Remember, the ASIANS are superior. The whites are inferior, remember? The ASIANS had the larger economy and are therefore superior. So if anything, it would be the whites being honorary Asians.
@@premodernist_history The Question is not about "superiority", the question is why wasn't the wheel invented in sub-Saharan Africa, if you're going to act like this then there is no knowledge here to be gained, just sound and you have become a perfect example of why academia has become the laughing stock of the intelligentsia. Also Asia had no problem inventing the wheel. I hope that this discussion can reclaim itself back to a more adult and intelligent conversation.
Modern civilization allowed the wheel to be vastly more useful, both to africans and to those who used camels - a la rubber for tires and the internal combustion engine
I think you're basically right, but there's 2 more cases you don't really cover (which is fine, but it's interesting to think about these edge cases) 1. wheelbarrows: western wheelbarrows are not long-transport tools, but useful for short-term transport of heavy goods. You'd think they'd be useful in African cities. Not sure why they weren't adopted in Africa, maybe just too niche. Chinese wheelbarrows seem like they would be even more useful anywhere you have relatively flat uncovered ground, and you can carry a decently large amount of goods without any pack animals. But the wet parts of Africa may have been too rough for their use without a major road-building plan. 2. There is a group of people who are nomadic and participate in agriculture, but do traditionally use wheel transports. In fact these people may have invented the wheel -- the inhabitants of the eurasian steppe. So there is a case for wheeled carts in non-agricultural societies. However I think the reason for this becomes clear when you look at the use of wheeled carts in eurasian steppe nomadic societies: they were used to transport their yerts/gers (made up of heavy timber and felt) when they traveled. In Mongolia, if you don't have an extremely heavily insulated tent overnight in winter, you will die; in Kenya you probably can use a much lighter tent, or sleep under the stars
Wheelbarrows really only appeared in Europe around the 12th century so the jump from wheel to wheelbarrow isn't as obvious as you might think, even to people who'd been using wheels and carts for centuries (if not millenia) at that point.
In pre-colonial America, used especially by the Great Plains nations, there was something of a "wheelbarrow". It's called the travois. It didn't have wheels, and avoided the pitfalls of a wheeled vehicle in a land without roads.
This channel's comment sections are usually so enlightening and respectful, to come in and see mountains of racist comments on this video is disgusting
Just came across your page today, I like it I think you have a good thing going here. I like that your videos aren't an hour long either. You get straight to the point in less than a half hour
Back in my day we used to take pride in constructing a camel by hand, now all these kids are spoiled with their store bought factory made camels.
😂
And they break down as soon as the warranty expires.
😂😅😊
Pfft probably say "made in China" on the back and everything
Don't get me started with eclectic camels!
One little trivia bit about ancient meso-America is that they independently invented the wheel, but they didn’t have beasts of burden to pull carts, so the wheel was largely used for inocuos things like kids toys. They didn’t need the wheel.
No one "needs" it. Sure is nice though.
Lots of non-wheel tech is actually superior for the conditions. e.g. sledges are great!
A question that still needs answering: Why didn't they use hand carts? Some of these cultures had the concept of the wheel down, like the Aztecs. Some of them even built extensive paved roads like the Maya. And the Aztec and Maya had mutual exchange through conquest. But they didn't use manpower to pull wheeled vehicles. Why not?
These people were wiped out by smallpox and conqured, the Africans were also conqured got independence, then became shitholes many such cases.
@@1987cml didn't they have lamas?
Came for “Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that Europeans are human beings” meme, stayed for the history lesson
Why didn't precolonial Africa have the wheel? Because they didn't want to reinvent the wheel!
Is that a lame leftist meme? You left-wing snowflakes are demons that want to censor everyone. Therefore leftists will never be funny.
@@Al-ou3soit’s okay grandpa time to take your meds 😂😂
Well what would else they be?
At 6:55
Even today the tsetse fly is a problem. I worked in a farm in Senegal and they tried twice to keep a horse and both times they didn't last a year :(
What about cattle?
Yes I was going to say this trypanosomiasis in Africa is seen as a agricultural problem. It was a problem in ancient times too though - its why the major mesopontanian and Euorpean armies didn't push south over land - their horses dided.
Next time, try a mule.
@@jimstiles26287you need horses to make mules.
@@jimstiles26287why ? Would it be more résistant ?
I think the reason this question gets asked is because the wheel is the basis of so many of our other technologies, that we cannot fathom life without it. The wheel isn't just used to transport things. It's used to generate power from water, to mill wheat, to spin thread, and so on
That’s probably the only thing I as a Nigerian may regret not having the wheel earlier on for, Ie powering industry but at the same time we honestly ig did not really need it for what we used or developed, even when we knew about it the fact that we still did not use it may just mean it had no major use for us, Africa was never truly isolated so we knew about it but sadly had no real practical use for it ig.
Yeah it is, but this doesn't change the material conditions. The development of the wheel like all other developments are a direct result of material conditions and so theres no real escaping that, the wheel lead to other technologies more or less by fluke.
Africa not having the wheel is just a myth , Precolonial Africa most certainly had the wheel .
@@sabrinat6838 What do you mean by material conditions? There's plenty of materials in Africa to make wheels.
@@joshrivers5191 Material conditions refers to conditions and circumstances in the real world/environment, not just the availability of literal "materials" (which would probably usually be referred to more as resources in this context anyway)
I’ve never heard Europe described as a “Peninsula of peninsulas.” It made me think for a bit and realize that it is pretty accurate.
It's a great description. Maybe we could call Europeans Peninsularites
@@DrRiq antepeninsula 😂😂😂
Thomas Sowell described it similarly.
@@mirzaahmed6589 gibbon did it before so sowell, and probably many before him.
If u haven’t heard it described like this, it’s Bc u don’t read enough history. and before u respond with some retort about how u do - no, u don’t.
Wheels aren't over-rated. It's leveled roads that are severely under-rated.
And they did use the wheel, just not for mobility... There's some toys...
Also, europeans did use camels, just not to the same extent.
Environment, as in "cold" is not a reason, you can breed to aclimate, but yeah, the terrain wasn't suitable. Navigable rivers are a blessing the best, but also an obstacle.
@lloydgush environment for camels is a big reason, it's extremely expensive to breed camels for multiple generations to get one that can survive in the Temps it needs to work in, compare that to wheels and carts, something that as a principle is so easy to make and repair that ancient societies around the world made them in bulk because for inter city transport there was nothing close to as good, and when a river didn't connect cities, there was nothing close to as good for the job again.
You are confusing africa with the Americans. There are no such african wheeled toys, there are mesoamerica wheeled toys, although they did not use them for long range transportation. Thus still is deeply impressive on the part of the mesoamericans. Why? Because that would make them 1 of exactly 2 populations which ever novelly invented the wheel - the other being Mesopotamians.
@@onijaanjonu3367 actually, there are, in west Africa at least.
@@onijaanjonu3367 also, in the case of west Africa, likely not independent.
And a curious case for why they didn't use it for pottery.
One reason for the failure of the First Siege of Vienna 1529 was the breakdown of the supply chain on camelback. The siege dragged into an unusually wet October, and camels cannot stand cold wet weather.
I've always wanted to know how camels were made, which was cheap in easy to manufacture and assemble, unlike those Swedish coffee tables
I usually get my camels, pre-constructed.
Just remember, try to avoid disassembling your camel, because if you do, the pieces never quite fit the same. Every camel I’ve ever reassembled has failed to live up to its factory assembled functionality.
@@PhantasmalBlast You monster! lmao.
it depends on the finish, a really shiny coat takes 2-3 more days typically than a matte coated camel
A camel is a horse designed by committee...
People use whatever resources are available to them: in Europe trees are abundant so they developed coffee table technology. In the desert you have two main things: sand and goats. Take some goat hides and spare organs, fill with sand according to time-honored techniques, and voila, you have a camel.
With respect to adoption of the camel, Europeans already had the ass (donkey) for overland transport. From what I've read, the ass probably handles the rocky, mountainous terrain found in Europe better than camels would. So, even if camels could have adapted to the European climate, they might not have been the best option for moving goods in between the riverine transportation networks.
Horses were and are still used in mountainous areas of Europe. The Swiss and Austrian armies still use them today. Why bother with freaking camels.
Horses really go well together with wheels though, so having mounts is not an excuse not to get better tech.
@@FifinatorKlon I'm one such a member of the Swiss army who uses horse to transport material. :)
If you want the size of a horse and the flexibility and brain of the donkey then the usage of mules is also great. A bit less than 10% of all pack animals the Swiss military uses are mules. I never worked with camels or heard about someone who uses camels as pack animals in Switzerland. What I know is that lamas are sometimes used in the Swiss alps. Or large goats. But in the end most people who still do pack animal work use horses, mules or donkeys.
A well trained horse or donkey is capable of working the field, carrying loads, being ridden, pulling tree trunks and carts. You can basically train a single animal to help you out in all your needs and don't need several animals for the various purposes. Those horses and donkeys can do the work almost independently, if trained well. For example there can be a guy loading the horse at one place and then the horse walks to some other place all on it's own and there some other guy removes the load. Of course that requires a peaceful country where people don't steal stuff or where no wolfs kill the horse along the way.
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I just read through an article comparing the camel with the horse. The article is biased towards the camel, so it required a bit if reading between the lines. But here are my conclusions why the horse/donkey is used in Europa and not the camel.
- For one the Camel is not native to Europa. I don't know how big that influence is, as the contact with camels goes back several millennia. So if the camel was noticeably superior then it would be used since the time of the Romans.
- Camels can carry about twice as much as horses and they require less maintenance (food, water, medical care, hoofing...) and have more endurance over long distances. Additionally they can better deal with with harsher terrain. But they are slower than horses. But when carrying loads then horses are also slow. So from the point of view of a pack animal, horses are not really faster or more agile. Based on the stats alone one would think the camels are more suited for the alps. I think the reason why they are not used is because horses are way more flexible in their usage. Camels are more useful for the purpose of long distance material transportation, but Europa doesn't need that due to the rivers and lakes and coasts. Also the Romans created a network of roads that lasted until today. So we can use boats and carriages instead of camel caravans. Europa probably needs pack animals for way shorter distances and Europa is fertile enough, that the increased water and food consumption is not that big of a problem. And poor people who can't afford the maintenance of a horse would just use donkeys or mules or oxen as an alternative. According to what I've read camels are better than horses in rough terrain like the mountains. But they didn't mention if camels also outperform mules and donkeys. Also the horses we use are pretty good at walking on difficult hiking paths. So I don't know how big the difference is between horses and camels.
Horses can be used as a fast warhorse, a hunting horse for the nobles or as a calm pulling horse for the farmer. Those horses I just listed were different breeds _(See "Medieval Misconceptions: HORSES" by Shadiversity),_ but since they are all still horses, the way to train them was pretty much the same. If you want to train camels then you would need completely different specialists. Form trainers to maintenance workers (hoofs, healthcare...). There are cases where camels would be superior to the horse, but the cultural infrastructure is already set up for horses so the additional cost of being unique makes the usage of camels too cumbersome.
- Camels are more difficult to train compared to horses due to their stubbornness. I don't know how their stubbornness compares to donkeys and mules. In my experience, the mules are somewhat similar to horses, at least in the military environment. The ones I know are slightly more stubborn, but since we only use well trained animals their performance is pretty much equal. Also we don't use them long enough so that the user can really get an optimal behavior out of the animal. Theoretically horses deal better with changing owners while donkey and mules prefer a single owner. Donkeys and mules tend to observe and think so if they notice something they show it to the owner while the horse tends to either be frightened or just follow the lead into danger. The horses we use are very well trained and frightened by almost nothing, pretty much comparable to the mules we used. In the military context where we use the animals for a few months at most, the difference in character in mules and horses is pretty small. I don't know how Camels compare, but based on the article I read, they seem to be less trainable than either the horse or the mule/donkey. I guess camels would be trainable for the caravan transport, but not as an all purpose worker like the horse or the mule is. Also camels are more sensitive to hectic and noisy environments compared to the horse. Horses just need to get used to the environment and then they don't care if they are on a shooting range or in the middle of the city.
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_Horses really go well together with wheels though, so having mounts is not an excuse not to get better tech._
Humans are lazy. They only use more advanced stuff (which comes with more maintenance), if they are forced to. In Europa they were forced to due to the environment and the feudal system. Also in the medieval times, they were under constant attack by the Muslims, and their trade routes to the east were heavily restricted by the Muslims too. And if we add to that the Greek/Roman heritage as well as the Christian mindset, that the universe follows universal laws that were given by a universal law giver, then a lot of things came together to create the industrial revolution. I do think there are biological effects that contribute how innovative a society is. But this is probably a small factor while geography, ideology and political structures are the bigger influence.
Also there is the thing that invention happened all around the globe in all cultures. The question is not if something got invented but if it is applied by the common folk in society. That is the point of when technology really gets an improvement.
Or in short, yes, having mounts is not an excuse to not get better tech, but we need to be motivated to invent stuff and then apply those inventions in the daily life.
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I hope you don't mind that I wrote a small novel. I got curious why the camel wasn't used in Europa and followed the rabbit hole. And writing down the thoughts helps me formulate my thoughts. So I just used this comment as a thinking help.
Mules, donkeys, horses... they were carrying salt from Austria to Bohemia along the Golden Path for millenia.
@@FifinatorKlonCamels can carry greater loads, move greater distances without stopping, and consume fewer resources than horses, they are superior pack animals by almost every metric
Horses are faster and more agile, great for hunting, sport, and warfare.
I remember the factoid that outside of 50 km of a navigable river or the coast, prior to the invention of railways, it wasn't economical for farmers to produce above a subsistence level, since the costs of fodder for their carts would kill their profits.
unfortunately that was on a hard drive of mine which crashed early in pandemic and I failed to think of taking it to my local white box guy in time as it caused me a surge of depressive and somewhat delusional symptoms
Especially before an efficient horse collar was invented in China and eventually reached Europe.
yes i'm sure they ran all those calculations, came to that conclusion, and decided the tradeoff wans't worth it. Lol
@@gfuentes8449 I can't cite the guy but it was a theory of why French agriculture developed where it did during the Enlightenment. The peasants who actually had carts were the better-off ones.
@@gfuentes8449factoid means untrue anyways
Early British colonial Australia imported camels and their drivers from elsewhere (the Ghan train from Adelaide to Darwin North South is named after British colonial Afghanistanian cameleers but many from colonial India) to solve the problem of transport into the interior of arid Australia before they could build railways and roads. There are now large numbers of non-native feral camels in Australia.
I’ve seen them
We have so many feral animals! Donkeys! Foxes! Rabbits! Cats people let out! Even the majestic Snowy Mountain wildhorses are technically invasive pests!
It's also easy to forget that, until maybe 150 years ago, many (smaller) loads were carried by other means even where transport on wheels would have been possible. I know that in my mother's rural German village, in the 19th century, there were of course carts and wagons which farmers used for big loads like harvest, hay, wood or a sheep pen. However. Draft animals were valuable and expensive, so was the extra food (oats). Also, not everybody who did agriculture had proper draft animals. Small farmers had to borrow animals from richer neighbours, or use a cow, and they wouldn't do that to their poor cow to draw stuff they could carry themselves (also they still wanted that cow to have calves and produce some milk!)
Market products like eggs, butter, fruit and vegetables were carried to town (several hours away) on the heads of the women who sold them. Carrying stuff on the head seems to be an African thing today, but 200 years ago it was common in many rural regions.
Even donkeys were still used to transport stuff like sacks of grain / flour to the miller and back.
This is something a lot of people forget, is that for millenia, keeping a horse is something really expensive that only few could maintain. Much more a carriage
@@Masterdesstructbut a handcart doesn't need a horse and still has wheels
Ye donkeys and heads :D But we still have wild horses, mb is hard to tame em
@@Maritimesgestein Handcarts aren't that useful when there isn't the infrastructure (roads) to use them, or the capacity to cheaply produce and maintain good wheels. Domestic animals, on the other hand, grow by themselves, self-repair, and deal with rough and/or muddy terrain relatively easily.
@@Maritimesgestein
Handcarts aren't as free as your own hands. If you really have something too heavy to carry, borrowing a donkey might still be cheaper.
"They were cheaper to construct"
"who makes camels?"
"camels make camels."
"explain!"
oversimplified reference?
"when a mommy camel and a daddy camel..."
@@horrorspirit"when one camel loves another camel..."
Professor speak.
Wheels are not overrated. They are amazing
hahaha
Until they get stuck in the middle of the desert😂
raycis whites n shieeee
@@realtalunkarkuBecause y’all literally are being racist wdf
@@rollitupmars how , wheres the racism
People are surprised when I tell them that the German Army relied on horses during the Invasion of France and during the Batttle of the Bulge
It ruins their myth.
I'm from Madagascar and here, during the pre colonial era, some people were already aware of wheels. The nobility who ruled over the central highlands actually avoided it as much as they can. The main reason is that by adopting wheels and so transport with wheels, adapted roads would have to be built. The highlands were surrounded by large hills and was a mountainous area, which meant accessing it would be difficult. The nobility saw it as a military advantage as it would make it more complicated for invaders to reach the capital. Along with jungles and dense forests which were infested by mosquitoes that could cause malaria, it was deemed an effective natural protection against invaders. Building roads adapted for wheels would mean that a stronger army could easily reach the capital (like the french). As far as I'm aware of, that was one reason why wheels were not adopted even when they have already witnessed other people using it.
Sorry if im being offensive or anything but do you have lemurs in the cities?
@@thegameranch5935 not in the cities but in villages near reserves you might find a few.
Reminds me of the time Cyrus built a road all the way to the Hellespont and after a failed attack on Greece, Alexander followed the road all the way back to Persepolis and the rest is history.
@@redcommierad2447 cool! I hope I will travel to Madagascar one day, its a beautiful place with wonderful wildlife and people.
@@thegameranch5935 now you know 😉😉
We dont construct camels??? such an art must have been lost to the ages
Nah, it's still a thing. I'm from a line of camelers. My daddy was a cameler like his daddy and so on. It's thankless work, but people need camels.
@@LiShuBen I thought small family camelers had died out since they invented assembly line constructed camels. I work as a hump assembler in the camel factory and in 6 months I've got a promotion to become senior hoof polisher
@@MittiMaten movin up, nice. And nice to hear that there are still some small family owned camel comp.s that stand by the quality of their craft. The big camel industry camels die on me pretty fast. I wanna switch and support a local supplier, but what can I say can't beat those prices. Slave to the capitalist game smh.
@@preston0 Yeah I know shame all politicians in Washington is bought and paid for by Big Camel
These days, cameling really is artisanal - the days of prêt à porter camels are long-since passed.
Times were - back in the 1980s - that you could go to Target on your way to the pub, and pick up an 87R camel (or dromedary).
I think the entire industry got ruined by the reduction in tariffs in the 1990s, which eviscerated the industry.
Also, camel-abuse was absolutely *rife* back then. People would go to the SS&A Club (mostly to pick up), then they would always take in a couple of Bactrian-v-Dromedary showdowns that were put on in the car-park by local gypsies.
Maybe the 1980s were different in Wodonga, but that's unlikely.
These days, you really want to ensure that you're getting a fair-trade free-range camel - preferable with a USB-C port (so that they can be recharged: the old micro-USB ones were a pain because you had to have the charger cord up the right way).
Wheels aren't only useful when you have draft animals. Human pulled hand carts and wheel barrows are very useful and were used in ancient times. They would certainly have had uses is southern Africa.
Africa has plenty of potential draft animals, Africans never domesticated them because of low genetic IQ potential. This entire video is just an excuse to ignore the actual detail no one wants to address, like so much other modern "social science"
@@gobomanaga5615which ones? Zebras? Zebras are ultra aggressive and persecuted.
Horses? Horses aren't native to western/southern/central africa but were available in north-eastern Africa and the Sahel (only camels). And they were quite useful for Ethiopians (Abyssinian horse), Somalis (camels and pony) and Nubians (Horses and camels)
@@RibeiroGames12 You don't need a continent or country-spanning system of interconnected roads, you simply need flat level terrain maintained within and around a city, town or village. Wheels are still a massive local efficiency increase for hauling goods about town! The wheel does not require the existence of draft animals or paved roads connecting major cities: just a civilization with the idea to make them, and the minimal capacity to make them useful (ie maintaining local thoroughfares).
The efficiency increases were seen as small enough that it never caught on as a useful idea (if the idea to use wheels that way occurred at all), maybe. That's fine! There's no harm in that being the case, really. Different priorities, or just bad luck. Bicycles weren't invented until the 19th century, and they are a massively efficient technology that operates on chains and gears and wheels - all ancient tech. Sometimes a really great idea just doesn't materialize for a few hundred/thousand years for no particular reason beyond "the thought never occurred to us to use this idea like that before now".
There's a kind of gross colonial paternalism in attempting to explain why the natives of certain places understandably couldn't/wouldn't have wheels. It reeks of accepting the premise that inventing and using the wheel is uniquely important, and then looks for ways to explain why groups who didn't do so are "just as smart" despite that fact. We should just accept that "Hey, they can be just as smart either way. Sometimes a good idea just... doesn't happen, and/or doesn't take off." Romans should have had bicycles. They didn't.
@@rushi5638We know for a fact that they are not as smart. It is Genetic, this has been proven in thousands of IQ studies, and Twin studies proving that it is the case irrelevant of rearing. The Social Sciences are attached at the hip to neomarxism and refuse this fact because it allows them to spread the ideology of the oppressor and the oppressed(because when you remove IQ there must be *SOME* reason why africans do so poorly in modern society) Like a doctor refusing you medicine so that he can give you his own proprietary treatment.
"Romans should have bicycles"
No, they shouldn't. They had horses and didn't have a way to mass manufacture the parts required for a bike chain and socket system which would make it viable in cost compared to a horse.
The sign is a subtle joke. The shop is called "Sneed's Feed & Seed", where "feed" and "seed" both end in the sound "-eed", thus rhyming with the name of the owner, Sneed. The sign says that the shop was "Formerly Chuck's", implying that the two words beginning with "F" and "S" would have ended with "-uck", rhyming with "Chuck". So, when Chuck owned the shop, it would have been called "Chuck's Feeduck and Seeduck".
lmao
Bazinga!
More like Chuck's f**k and suck
It would be fuck and suck…
@@yuron8210 look how it steals that entire catalytic converter without dropping the fried chicken wing
Let’s not forget the wheelbarrow. It’s a great increase in productivity over using a basket to move material.
shhhh don't ruin their fun of trying to defend minorities
@@HBon111 You're definitely going to hell.
Bull shit. You didn't know that having women transport goods by placing them in baskets on top of their heads is the most efficient way? You must be racist.
Right, move alot of material for what though? The traditional west african house is made from sticks and the ground it stands on.
A wheelbarrow is more of an expensive afterthought. It doesn’t cost as much when you already have an industry of making carriages and carts and all sorts of things going. But in isolation how many cultures used wheelbarrows when they couldn’t use carriages at all?
I recently visited Hawaii and went to a sacred historical site (Pu'uhonua O Honaunau National Historical Park). The park ranger there gave a talk about the native Hawaiians, and touched on the fact that they didn't use any wheeled vehicle for transportation. He pointed out how many people equate that to a lack of technological innovation, but then pointed all around to the landscape around him and was like "do you really think it would be smart to try to wheel a cart over these jagged lava rocks?" They just used canoes instead.
Well that's a fairly stupid response actually. Plenty of civilizations indigenous to unideal geographical locations adopted the wheel throughout history and got on just fine with it.
@@patavinity1262 You must not have ever visited Hawaii. It's unfeasible even for modern cars to navigate most of the landscape. It's miles and miles of wildly uneven jagged lava rock that even bulldozers struggle to break up.
why would they put their villages on jagged lava rocks? Their villages were in low lands, where wagons or wheel barrels would be beyond helpful. Transporting goods by waterways, and transfering hundreds of pounds of goods from the canoe to a wagon or wheel barrel pushed and or pulled by a few, is much better than having to have the whole tribe carry it on their backs.
@@logarhythmic6859 I *have* visited Hawaii as a matter of fact - my mother is Hawaiian and I've spent a lot of time there. In fact I think it's clear I know the landscape better than you - there are many areas with even ground and which are entirely navigable using wheeled vehicles. If TH-cam allowed me to do so, I'd post images of Hawaii to demonstrate this point, but you can easily see for yourself by searching online.
The geography of Hawaii is in fact, unsurprisingly, not entirely consistent everywhere on the islands. There are perhaps areas of 'wildly uneven jagged lava rock' but that by no means characterizes the entirety of the landscape. The newer, outer parts of the island will naturally be rockier, while further inland the terrain is smoother - that this is the case is obvious if you think about it, as rocks erode away and soil builds up with time. Where my family live, south-west of Hilo (which is not even that far from the shore), it is nothing like what you describe. There are certainly rock formations around, but nothing that would make wheels impossible to use. The steepness of some of the slopes in Hawaii and the vegetation would have been far more important obstacles than rocks but these are not insurmountable either. In various parts of Hawaii there are expansive ranches where the forests have been cut down - rolling grassland without any rocks at all. And even where there *are* a lot of rocks, it would still generally be quite possible to navigate with a large-wheeled wagon even where it is not possible with a small-wheeled car.
As the other commenter noted, your explanation also doesn't take into account the fact that canoes may be ideal for transporting things from one part of the shore to another, it's not going to help you if you live in the middle of one of the islands.
A much better explanation for the Hawaiians' not having used wheels becomes apparent if you look at the example of Peru - wheeled childrens' toys have been discovered which were made by the Incas, proving they understood the principle of the wheel. So why no large wheeled vehicles? Because unlike in ancient Mesopotamia, for example, they didn't have any large animals to harness such vehicles to, and so didn't build any. The same goes for the native Hawaiians - the largest animals they had were pigs.
They could have build roads.
Maybe Europe did not go for the camel because the Roman Empire created a surfaced road network at least in the Mediterranean Basin. Makes it easier to use wheeled transport.
Maybe Europe did not go for the camel because they had superior technology - the wheel
how you dare imply Africans didn't have superior technology and innovation
@@david7384it's superior once you have powerful states that can build roads in favorable environments. Wheels, again, lack much viability without pack animals or smooth plains. They're pretty much useless in dense jungle.
If we're talking about dromedary camels they basically can't even live year-round in temperate zones, it actually created logistical problems for the Muslims during the Arab conquests as they drove further north.
Bactrian (two-humped) can endure temperate zones so was popularly used along the silk road but I'm guessing they were just never raised in great numbers in eastern europe so western europe wouldn't have a nearby source to start with.
It's all so tiresome.
The coping? Ya it is
Replaced
@@hurehuren8628 Doubt
Great reference
You spoke too soon.
You focused just on transportation, whereas in other areas of human activity wheels were also used. For example, in windmills or mechanical devices of many kinds.
All hail Pulleys
We also don't use canals to carry firewood a few hundred feet, but we sure as heck will use a wheel on a frame, or a couple of wheels. OP is just being obtuse.
Pretty much everything in modern civilization requires a wheel to exist. People that just think about vehicles when a wheel comes to mind are just idiots. Just like people that protest the use of crude oil without understanding that everything they use to protest said oil is produced using crude oil.
the distaff is sort of a wheel
as is a potter's wheel
@@bashkillszombies Aveiro and Venice don't exist. Ok.
I can't believe the Europeans were so closed-minded as to not embrace the camel!
Camel are easily replaced by horses because they are faster and have more power to pull things.
Racist cave monkeys wouldn't use camels!
Are you serious? Watch that video again 🤦🏼♂️
@@ukaszangowski536 hes most likely joking (I hope)... because we didnt need camels. the wheel was invented in Mesopotamia. we just applyed that invention and used it in correct way 😅
camels can tow a WHEELED vehicles. like a horse. just that camel has advantage in DRY ENVIRONMENT and HORSE got advantage in power. thats all.
@@bambino_88horses cannot carry more than a camel, and camels are just as fast over distance. Camels are also quite capable of surviving in European climates with minimal extra care versus horses.
European horses were also small - we call them ponies today. It wasn't until the great big horses from the middle east were taken to Europe that the horse as you're imagining it became a thing in Europe.
The bottom line is: horses are not better than camels, they aren't even better in European terrain! They definitely wouldn't have been a better option than a camel back then either.
I had researched this subject within the past year or so, and learned about the zones where the tseotse fly attacks the equine population. However in the Northern Sahel region bordering the sahara, the horse culture of the Hausa people does thrive. Also in Ethiopia, horses were used by the nobility to some extent during the latter centuries.
Well, yeah, but he's talking about wheeled vehicles. The Egyptians used chariots (an idea borrowed from the Hittites) but only for war or the transport of elite persons....why? Horses are expensive to feed and despite what many people think, are not good endurance animals, so not really good for pulling wagons over long distances (that's why when used the teams have to be changed regularly.) Additionally, just try driving a cart through sand.
@@jackrice2770Horse are one of the most endurant specie on the planet.
They sweat, use oxygen efficiently, have fatigue resistant muscles.
@@RationalP And yet, if a human and horse were to race across the US, the human would win, as humans can cover more ground for more hours on a daily basis. Yes, horses are adapted for running (duh) but they only need to run far enough and fast enough to out-distance their predators. Humans hunted horses for millenia just as other herbivores are hunted today, by the exhaustion method. I like horses, but they're not super-creatures, and most of what's shown in movies amounts to animal abuse. You gallop a horse flat out for hours and you'll have a dead horse.
The tropical rain forests of central Africa, the Amazon and the Andes were and still are fully covered with trees. In those conditions roads for carts were not (are not) used for several reasons: 1. The forests would re-take (grow over) the road very fast. It rains a lot so carts would get stalk. People walked (and still does) along paths in the forests and use rivers (canoas). In the high Andes of Perú and Bolivia, people used, and still use, lamas (same genera as camels). Of course they know carts and wheels but lamas are “better”, less costly, more efficient for the topography. Lamas, like camels do no need roads to be built and maintained.
So was China during the Zhou dynasty. Yet they built roads for chariots in jungles and in high places. The Egyptians used chariots in the Sahara.
@@danielradu3212 China does not rain nearly as heavy as it does in most rainforests, same for Egypt
@@hez859 China experiences large typhoons and catastrophic floods. India also experiences monsoon rains yet implemented chariots over time since 1500 BCE. Sometimes a civilization (Bantu or Atzlan) miss a key innovation. Just like the Americans walked on the moon and not the British. The Chinese also missed vital innovations in gunpowder weapons, despite inventing it.
llamas are cheaper to construct.
@@danielradu3212you are mentioning two civilizations bordering with other civilizations with drastically different climate conditions. Chinese never could get into Vietnam and into those deep jungles, and egyptians were mostly Mediterranean technologically so they had to keep chariots for war. Also, their climate was good enough for agriculture and keeping horses along with camels
Reminds me of why the wheel was not adopted in the Americas except in limited numbers. Its a common misconception that nobody ever had the inventive spark and thought of the idea of the wheel but that is not true. In the mountainous areas in say the South American mountain ranges the wheel is ill suited as its too dangerous when you do not have modern braking systems because when going downhill you have to spend all over your energy to prevent the load your are carrying behind you from running you right over or worse. They did have wheels on things like children's toys so they had certainly thought of it but had to use options better suited for the local environment. similar story with North America, The wheel just gets stuck in the mud unless you build a well irrigated Roman road wherever you want to go.
Yes, exactly.
Wheels are used for more than transportation that requires brakes. Why didn’t any of these people use a wheelbarrow, the easiest way for a person to move heavy things by themselves? Also having something on a toy doesn’t mean you can grasp the full extent of its use. The Greeks made toys that used steam pressure to move, that doesn’t mean they could have made a steam engine.
@@chariotrider9716
The Greeks did invent a steam cannon.
@@chariotrider9716 they probably didn’t need a wheelbarrow or perhaps they were made and just got erased by history since they would have decayed by now.
@@chariotrider9716the andean people didn't have horses at the time so they used lhamas to carry extra weight around and a system of mountainous roads that connected Cusco to Ecuador and several other cities, they had corn and potatoes that could easily grow so no need to overcomplicate irrigation, they had armors, weapons, great monuments and cities, they developed mathematical formulas and early forms of writing, if they had horses maybe they would have made a greater use of whells but at the time it was basically useless
I think you should amend your title to, Why precolonial Africa didn't have the wheel FOR TRANSPORT. When I hear the word wheel, used as you present it I think of transport yes, but also water wheels, windmills and mechanical motor mixers. Or even the simple karum. So, I think a more through question is, did Africa use the wheel in any capacity?
😂😂 there were chariots and mill's
@@shafsteryellow so, we're in agreement. it's not about the wheel, the video is about the cart/wagon.
@@joe18750 What is a chariot? There were carts used to unload goods from the coast and transport in markets across the horn and North Africa... sure niger-congo speaking regions have a different climate with dense vegetation and rainy seasons that make it useless. However that's not all of africa so the title is ridiculous but you're very right in limiting a wheel to just transport is very silly since it was used for processing grains and pottery even in those regions that didn't use it for transport
When he started talking about rivers I immediately thought of my wheelbarrow. Does he think every yard and construction site has a river crossing by?
@@olemewexactly. I was thinking “yea, but how did they get goods TO that river”
Why did you show almost all Saharan Africa ? What did sub Saharan use instead? They didn’t use camals
zebras 🦓🦓🦓🚃🚃🚃
@@DrRiq Lmao no 😂 zebras have never been domesticated.
There are no draft animals native to sub-Saharan Africa.
Africans didn't travel much that's why most of tribes and such remained untouched. Sahara Africa people has to keep traveling to survive
Sub Sahara Africans didn't travel much and they didn't have to transport much, those by a body of water used the water but it still didn't require large boats, that's one reason most tribes and such remained untouched, Sahara Africans had to keep traveling to survive and trade was their hussle, camel is great for this.
Assuming that the wheel is only used for transportation
Yeah that's reasonable, although that was the original use case of the wheel and axle was wheeled transport. The wheel as in the potters wheel - which predated it, was fairly spread in eurasia but not used in African and native American pottery. This implies it's use in this form was simply less mobile. Ditto with the pulley
the wheel was invented for transportation
@@blank_3768 Actually, it was invented for pottery, then adapted for transportation, and then for mechanical usage (pulleys, etc).
@@BroadwayRonMexico yeah i know that now, not sure what i was thinking a year ago lol
You're ignoring all the European uses of the wheel besides long range transport. E.G. hand and donkey carts, windmills, watermills, spinning wheels, the potter's wheel, flywheels for operating construction cranes, etc.
Probably because wakanda created floating vehicles and didn't need them.
I think another interesting thing to point out is that the wheel and axl was not a widespread invention but appeared to have been invented once in Eurasia and spread around. Outside of that we can't find much evidence of cultures anywhere independently making the wheel and axle. Plenty of cultures have toys and small constructions showing that a concept of the wheel existed, but the wheel and axle as a form of transport seems to have been a very unique spark of genius.
But there were carts in Somalia long before Italians came..
@@skp8748 Italy wasn't Somalia's first contact with the rest of the world you know.
@@skp8748Italy didn't exist until after the Industrial revolution had started. We are talking about pre industrial revolution, pay attention please.
@@skp8748 You get that we´re talking thousands of years earlier, do you?'
First time "italians" visited somalia was when the roman empire owned egypt.
And people had chariots long before the romans.
That said, it's one of those things, that finding evidence for isn't especially easy. Most of what we know about ancient wheeled vehicles such as chariots, comes from people talking/writing about them. It's definitely possible that they were more widespread than we realise. Indeed it is possible some cultures adopted then abandoned the wheel at some stage or other. There's a lot of proverbial, and literal mud between us and the whole picture.
Apparently both the Ethiopian Highlands and the Somali peninsula used the wheel. The Ethiopian Highlands had/have rain-fed agriculture and an abundance of livestock, including horses.
Not surprised. The Horn of Africa is ancient and had long standing ties & relations with many parts of the world unlike the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa, tbh they shouldn’t even be apart of that “category”
@justsomeguywithamask1351 😂😂 Africans accomplished a lot, be it South, North , West East.
Exactly, we had chariots forever before colonisers came (and failed to colonise Ethiopia)
@@Qhawe_Jameson. LOOOOOOL
@Patriarch.Chadimus get over colonial imposed African history and propaganda. The Great Wall of Benin is second to that of China. Great Zimbabwe. Adams Calendar is the only ancient accurate Celestial alignment and observatory recorded history.
But people don't just use wheeled vehicles for long-range transport, there were plenty of carts used to carry goods around town. It's a little silly to say Europeans disfavored the wheel because they had rivers. Also I am not sure your arguments about cost etc. hold true for a small handcart.
He did mention short-range transport as a use case for wheeled vehicles.
2:45-3:12
Yeah this isn't his best video. Seems convoluted, like trying to shoehorn history into a modern sociological view. Or perhaps just big opinions developed by someone with a small store of practical experience to draw from (tho, sincerely, a delightful surplus of "book learnin").
The basic use case for the wheel is not transport at all, as we conceive that industry. It's wheelbarrows and dollies--that is, materials handling. Building on even the smallest scale is a lot less fun if you lack a wheelbarrow.
If indeed Sub-Saharan Africans didn't use wheelbarrows and dollies, then I think the true explanation might have something more to do with a surfeit of human labor. Wheelbarrows and dollies--and indeed proper transportation vehicles--are work multipliers: they allow a lone individual (or a teamster) to do much more work than he could do without the machine. Perhaps the Sub-Saharan Africans, when there was work to be done, all pitched in as a village. Or perhaps projects were only directed by leaders with plenty of subordinates. The only time you'd have a project but wouldn't care to have a wheelbarrow is if you've got strong-backed youths by the dozen at your beck and call and no better use for their time. You don't need work multipliers if there's plenty of hands to the work.
Exploring these paths could make a fascination investigation into any culture's view of what work is desirable? and what is the worth of people's time? and what might they do instead if not this work?
I'd guess it comes back to winter: you don't really need work multipliers if winter ain't a-comin. But if winter is coming, then you're always runnin scared that you won't have done enough to make it through. And you can't so easily call the neighbors to come help you get ahead of your problem, because their family is working feverishly at solving the same problem.
I've seen conflicting things regarding the cost of labor in precolonial Africa. Some scholars think labor was expensive, and others think it was cheap.
About wheelbarrows as work multipliers -- I don't know about Africa, but in the Middle East up until maybe a century ago they didn't use wheelbarrows either. Instead they'd have two guys carry a load like a stretcher. How would that affect efficiency? I could be wrong, but I imagine that just means you need two guys to move something around the job site instead of one, without affecting the labor cost of the rest of the project.
In precolonial Africa we're not talking about modern construction projects where time is money. These were villages with often large family and clan units that pooled their resources. Also, the population size generally didn't change much, so not a lot of demand for new construction. You build the houses, granary, etc. once and then use it for a hundred years.
Well I think it's a powerful data point that labor was cheap, if indeed precolonial Sub-Saharan Africans eschewed viable work multipliers after learning of them. (Tho there may of course exist subtle dichotomies, like 'all intensive labor (construction, agriculture, long-distance trade) was directed by community leaders, who enjoyed such heady authority that, to them, everything was cheap, while to the ordinary person, perhaps, hired labor was virtually unobtainable, owing to the many projects of the leader.')
I think there are not so many places on earth where, when labor is dear, a wheelbarrow wouldn't be a big advantage: in very soft ground, bogs or sand, and in broken ground, strewn with big rocks or gullies, and in ground so mountainous, so lacking level spots, that homesteads are built on steep hillsides.
These exclusions would presumably account for some (perhaps much) of the mideast, where you say they used two-man stretchers in place of wheelbarrows. Fair enough. One-man (or draught-animal-powered) versions of a stretcher are the sled and the travois. Having carried innumerable trays and dragged sleds, I tell you with confidence: Dude. Wheels are sweet.
Which brings me back toward my point: that rejecting work multipliers seems to me to indicate a situation where the person directing work and the person doing that work are not the same person, and there is a great gulf fixed between those two persons, so that the laborer, who naturally thinks all day long, while mutely portering, sweat pouring from brow, about how to make the work go easier, was not in position to effect innovation.
As to your mention of stable populations and long-serving structures, this seems not tremendously distinct from medieval Europe, right?
But I liked very much your mentioning the concept 'time is money.' The South Sea Islanders, for example, I'm given to understand, did not think time was money. They seemed to think time was something much better than money. And good on them. But the idea that time is money seems to me a thoroughly a fear-of-coming-winter-based idea, and that idea seems to be the dominant modern idea. If true, interesting that one of the main exports of Europeans to their colonies was (knowingly or unknowingly, artificial) fear of winter.
Thanks for discussing.
I would also argue that there were/are fewer selective pressures in these regions. When the weather is good enough to have livestock and pick fruit from trees year-round, you have less need for grain. Grain was useful because after grinding it with a wheel, it could be stored over winter months when food was less available. Shelters also had to be more advanced technologies to keep you and your livestock warm half the year. This lead to more advanced stoves and a pressure to discover more energy-dense fuels. Energy-dense fuels were integral to the industrial revolution, and the engine is basically a very complex stove. Necessity is the mother of invention. When food availability is "good enough," there's no need to develop these technologies
In other instances where this is the case, people generally bred crops into a functional order
when food is available and plentiful enough, there's no need to evolve a prefrontal cortex, being a great ape is good enough
Very interesting video! I'll add the tentative of introducing the camel transportation in Brazil through the arid areas of northeast. Brazil's emperor Peter II went to a huge trip to the middle east during the end of XIXth century and came back with camels to be introduced in Brazil. The idea wasn't crazy, because northeastern Brazil was very dry, had only low and rough vegetation and no roads at all. Eventually there was lots of difficulties that made this not possible. It was hard to communicate with the Egyptians that came along, they were homesick, camels didn't reproduce as it was expected and locals thought the animals were too difficult to train and to manage compared to donkeys.
Never in my life have I seen someone write 19th century in Roman numerals lol.
It's a Brazilian thing. (Can confirm as a Brazilian myself.) Not really sure why, since it just makes teaching kids more confusing, but I was indeed taught that way in school.
@@Gohka it's funny you say that, I've been living in Canada for almost a decade and in Quebec we do the same : Roman numbers are all around.
@@Gohka Usually westerners think their way of doing things is the only way that exists. You are an example of that.
@@tiagomd3811 Its the best way. No sense in using 2 conflicting numeral systems. Its like cursive. I HATE cursive.
What about wheelbarrows and hand-carts? I can understand their absence from non-agricultural regions, but they certainly don't need roads or animals to be useful. Just not as long distance transport.
To carry what exactly. A donkey will do that.
@@bluelight4907 It can carry more with a wheeled cart
Look up the travois.
Baskets wheels getting stuck is more inconvenient than just carrying in a basket
Why waste your time building conveyances when you have the superior ability to carry things on top of your head?
5:50 "And how scornfully the camels would look at us."
Camels: "LOOK WHAT THEY NEED TO MIMIC A FRACTION OF OUR POWER."
Whats with all thr "cope" comments? Dude is just talking about history
The comments are from people who have no arguments against the historical facts in this video. Ironically, their statements of "cope" is in fact a coping mechanism on their part. Unfortunately, they're just too dumb to realize it.
@@NanakiRowanyou’re on every comment for months. The copium is weapons grade 🤣🤣🤣 what a loser!
@@anthonysoprano7066 Nope, and you literally just validated my statement, you absolute clown 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Basicly they beleive Africans are inherently inferior and this video is a cope as it tries to give real explanations for things rather than racism.
@@NanakiRowan you are obsessed, go eat a watermelon
Until people with the wheel showed up......
Wheels are useful only for people who construct and successfully maintain roads. Romans did, Europeans do and Africans don't.
Tell that to the Yamnaya
It's a feedback loop - there's no reason to maintain manicured flat roads if you're not using wheeled vehicles, and there's no reason to use wheeled vehicles if you don't have manicured flat roads.
Medieval Europe didn’t adopt camels…, because it was the Dark Ages there. And camels can’t see in the dark. 😅😂
Okay, so wheels weren't used on wagons etc. to travel because of things you mentioned but what about short distance heavy lifting on like wheelbarrow or a crane system with wheel pulley thingy? I imagine if there were any sort of large scale construction things like that would be great. If you talked about then I missed it and I'm sorry 😅
Pottery and toys and watermills also have wheels in them. And at least when it comes to pottery then the channel owner replied to a comment that sub-Saharan Africa didn't have it. If wheels weren't used for simple stuff like wagons and pottery then they were definitely not used for more complex stuff like cranes and windmills.
nope, he just did 12 minutes of straight cope
Save yourself practical arguments, this video's goal is to advance an ideology
Great video. I just wanted say I completely lost it when you said that camels were easier to construct. That just made my day.
I mean, it is if you have enough Pylons. Else...
Well....they are if you have male and female camels. They have a way of constructing themselves lol
@@junkmail5283 Wait, is this a StarCraft reference?
@@premodernist_historynot that I know but i share your interest!
@@premodernist_history I enjoyed that blooper too!! Thank you for leaving it in the video ☺️
Europe didn't need camels because horses, donkeys, mules, and oxen
No common sense allowed here.
You mean domestication that their European ancestors did to allow them that option
@@JoeDueterte "european ancestors"... europeans... yes. So? I meant what I meant. It's not complicated.
@@malachi-Exactly, that's why you two geniuses completely missed the point. It's not about camels specifically, it's about pack animals being a better fit than pulled carts in certain situations.
“So why didn’t Europeans adapt to using *superior technology* like the camel?” Great question. I often wonder why the Apollo moon missions used inefficient rocket fuel as opposed to the proven and efficient method of burning coal
I have the plugin that shows dislikes and I'm frankly perplexed at the ratio I'm seeing. This is clearly a well researched piece with sources provided and no strong opinions that could invite disagreement. You even went so far as to encourage corrections and more in-depth knowledge from specialists in African history. Regardless, thank you as always for your explorations of topics that pique your interest.
Ah but you see, he’s portraying Africans as intelligent human beings, and obviously we can’t have that on the internet /s
And he used the arguments which racists liked to use to discredit africans on the european sites. I strongly suspect they really didn't like that.😂😂 The truth that we all are just humans, for better or worst, is quite a hindrance for people, who take their only possible way of claiming pride, in a false sense of racial superiority. 😂😂😂😂 PATHETIC🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Many racists are relying on the myth that Africans can't innovate. Hence the downvote
@@queasybeetle they innovate shaking they asses LMAO
@@KNIGHTMAREMANIACand you innovate sleeping with your sister LMAO
Is there a similar explanation for written language, Archery, or multi story buildings?
They did not lack archery, they did have written language and while I don't know about multi-story buildings, they did have at least two-story buildings.
(I am not native speaker so I assume by archery you mean bow and arrow, which they obviously had).
@@dann_mrtinsOH MY GOD 2 story buildings! Wow that’s so impressive! Bows in the 19th century!! OMG!! Wow!!
@@JackAubreyy as far as I know gunpowder was used since after the end of 16th century. Maybe you don't know but Kanem-Bornu empire already had gunpowder at 16th century, and other african kingdoms adopted it since then. You should study a bit more.
@@JackAubreyy and two-story buildings are not impressive but idk why there are some comments bringing specifically that sub-saharan Africa never had any two-story buildings. So if not impressive, idk why they bring it up
@@dann_mrtins cannibals that we jump started from the Neolithic age to the post industrial. No wonder they cause so many problems, they never had to develop anything themselves because they were incapable of doing so. Go read the British first encounter accounts and tell me they had grand civilizations.
What happened in parts of India where they did not use the wheel or a camel? Is this just a area left bare by the map? Or was it a scenario similar to Africa where conditions prohibited the use of both?
I left it off because of my own ignorance. The wheel was definitely used in India. I just don't know if they also used water transport extensively (outside of Bengal, where I'm confident water transport was king), so I wasn't prepared to go out on a limb and say they used wheeled transport primarily or in combination with water. For all I know they may have used wheeled transport exclusively, in which case I couldn't color it blue on the map. Although I'm pretty sure head porterage was also a thing there.
@@premodernist_history this is the only angle you didn't really cover, namely the importance of water transport in Europe and the Near East as well. Even today most goods are still transported by sea, it was always the case before, except in premodern times the rivers and coastlines were main arteries for trade. The Congo, Nile, Swahili coast, etc
India had elephants, which I suppose comes with certain specific perks.
India has elephants, and also used donkeys in the smaller parts for load transport, however royalty and richer individuals often used carts as there were basic roads built as well. water canals were definitely used in perennial canals in the south, and during th emonsoon as well@@premodernist_history
it's pretty silly to compare with water based travel because even in our modern era most transport is still done by water, the scale is just orders of magnitude greater
the U.S. army ended up changing from horse to truck even though horses still had better cross country ability
you could also point out that even in the middle ages they had the Roman road network to work with
Exactly. By tonnage, sure water transport far exceeds ground transport and probably always will. But that still doesn't explain all of the small human scale movements of goods that are required on a day to day basis. Most people aren't perfectly adjacent to a navigable water source. Maybe it is simply that Africans never domesticated their local animals. Cows, camels, and goats were relatively recent additions. Without decently productive agriculture and animal husbandry, you don't get the excess resources necessary for tradesman to develop crafts such as metallurgy and carpentry. Good luck building something as simple as a wheelbarrow without a smith and a carpenter.
@@marshallscot As mentioned in the video, some parts of Africa without the tsetse fly did actually have people with domesticated animals, but wheels aren't really necessary to move something that can move itself. Most of these sorts of people were nomadic pastoralists moving their herds from pasture to pasture.
@@yee2631 That sounds a lot like the Eurasian steppe herders who did use horse carts, and later on chariots. Maybe the difference was that they lived in the wagons at some point? Or as the guy above pointed out, was it their unusual access to metallurgy? Most pastoral cultures (I think) were not advanced in metallurgy.
@@KanadMondal I'm by no means an expert on that subject, but chariots were mostly used for warfare among ancient eurasian steppe cultures as far as I'm aware, and perhaps the most notable example of this would be the Yamnaya culture (who are often associated with early proto-indo-european culture). The thing is, the Yamnaya culture almost certainly didn't invent this technology themselves and probably learned it from another culture which likely learned it from another prior to that. The wheel, as it was used across most of eurasia, was not invented independently for the most part, at least not very often as far as I know, and largely radiated out from the middle east before being innovated upon further by other cultures. The poster above me metioned metallurgy as a possible factor in the development of wheels, but the earliest archeological examples of wheeled vehicles (like chariots) that we have are entirely wooden. It was only later with other cultures, such as early celtic cultures in europe, that metal rims were added to the wheels of wagons, chariots, and other early vehicles.
@@yee2631 So, the Yamnaya culture never had chariots, the Sintashta culture, a much later Indo-Iranian group in Central Asia invented them. The Yamnaya, as far as I am aware, sometimes lived in wagons, which were not really the same. By metallurgy maybe not its incorporation into the wheels themselves was meant, but the creation of the tools to make accurate spoked wheels. As for that, obviously the wheel wasn't just invented by one group, but the spoked wheel I think was, if not unique, then characteristic of PIE groups. I remember hearing that it is unusual for steppe cultures to be metallurgically advanced, which I thought might be the exception to make the difference in wheels. Besides that, the people for the Eurasian steppes, IE or not, were very warlike. The Sahara and other more plain areas in Africa are also not really steppes, so there could be a difference there. I wasn't really pointing to anything in particular, but just spewing out a bunch of factors that may influence the development of the wheel and variants of it or its omission from transport altogether. I heard someone suggest that the PIE may have learned of the wheel from them Middle East, too, owing to their CHG ancestry. While I am unsure of the time period for that one, it would explain why the Native Americans did not use the wheel by default even though they spring off from the Ancient North Eurasians.
Top notch. I know it's good because of all the colonial coping in the comments. When the top comments clearly did not watch the video I know the content must be impactful, and that's exactly what I found.
Simple, concise, easy to understand, and obvious
Why is the wheel, in light of this video, described as huge invention? Camels where used in B.C. Canada during the gold rush. They failed miserably.
Camels understandably struggle as far north as Canada.
@@deeznoots6241 ironic since that's where the first camelids arose
it’s because our culture is derived from wheeled cultures and yee oldie historians believed that their culture was superior so more emphasis is placed upon the invention of the wheel.
Because geometry is crucial to physics.
@@deeznoots6241 They also were introduced to Arizona at one point and failed there.
I love that you asked people to correct you at the end so that we can all learn! Question: Why wasn't the potter's wheel adopted in Sub-Saharan Africa? (Or was it? I looked but couldn't find any information.) I've heard the lack of draft animals explanation before, and it makes sense for the transport wheel. However, you don't need draft animals to make good use of the wheel for pottery - just your hands +/- feet.
Many West African cultures used wheel-like apparatuses in the their textile looms (heddle pulleys).
I wasn't able to find anything either, so I can only speculate. I guess there are probably two advantages to a pottery wheel: You can produce certain forms that aren't possible otherwise, and you can produce at speed. If a community isn't making large quantities of pottery and already has a certain style they like, then the pottery wheel might not seem worth it.
I suspect the areas that adopted the pottery wheel were areas of higher population, leading to cities and division of labor (e.g. Mesopotamia, India, China). A machine that allows one to mass produce pottery would make sense there because of the increased demand for pots. In a small village without a complex urbanized economy, the advantages of a pottery wheel might not be fully utilized.
@@premodernist_history Pottery was discovered and subsequently abandoned many times before there was agriculture, since paleolithic people were nomads and didn't need to store anything. It became very important in places like the middle east once the neolithic revolution happened and people became sedentary. Ceramic pots were used to store grain and other food items and having a large pottery industry became economically viable. But ceramic pots weren't the only available technology for storage. For example, the mediterranean world used to store wine/beer in large pottery jugs, before the romans expanded into Gaul and learned of the gaullish use of wooden barrels for such needs, and that became the preferred storage method since then.
@@Faerandur Paleolithic people carried gourds and animal bags and mushroom bags… what the hell are you talking about
Every individual community made their own pottery (if they used it), and the low need for pots kept innovative ideas for the process on the back burner.
Interesting. Can you do a video on why they didn't have written language? And two-story building?
There were two-story buildings. I don't know much about the history of writing in Africa. I'm still a beginner in African history. Good idea for a video topic though.
These can help you in the meantime, Charles. There were written languages as well as two-story buildings (as if that is even meaningful): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_systems_of_Africa
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Africa
@@NanakiRowan literally al of the languages you presented refer to north africa and arab colonies. All subsharan script is colonial or post-colonial. Why are you lying like this?
@@EpicFilip I'm sorry, but Nsibidi was developed in Nigeria, which is sub-Saharan Africa. I'm also sorry that Ge'ez was developed in the Horn of Africa, which is also sub-Saharan Africa, by Ethiopians. I'm truly sorry that Adinkra was developed by Ghanaians in Ghana, which is sub-Saharan Africa. I'm even *more* sorry that Lusona was developed in Angola, which is sub-Saharan Africa. Also, whether or not any other languages were developed during colonial or post-colonial times is irrelevant, as they still were developed by sub-Saharan Africans and not by anyone else. I think that instead of lying about history, you should find a better coping mechanism, darling.
Sshhhh. Uou not supposed to talk about this
Before you read this, I am NOT an africanist nor am I an expert on the subject, not all of my information may necessarily be correct so don't take it all as 100% factual. That said, I do read about and take an interest in Africa and do generally take notice in some misconceptions others may not.
I feel your video is based upon a flawed premise. To broadly state that africa south of the sahara did not utilize the wheel prior to European colonization would be false as there were places such as Mali that have evidence of the existence of the wheel as well as places such as Ethiopia. Granted, the former, Mali, is similar to the Mayans as I specifically refer to the usage of wheels on toys. What this suggests is that the idea of the wheel was not foreign to them. It would instead be more accurate to ask why the wheel was not widespread in precolonial africa which likely, at least in part, boils down to a lack of domesticable animals as a result of Tse Tse flies in parts of Central Africa, geography that I don't know enough to comment on, as well as isolation.
If we are to take 'precolonial' to mean before any outside influence, that would be an arbitrary standard to specifically hold Africa to as many places and civilizations have adopted something from someone else. Its not as if everyone had jsut magically developed in a vaccum, even so called 'cradles of civiliation'. Japan was influenced quite a bit by the Chinese. Hellenic culture has much of its origins in southern europe, but also strong mediterranian and northern african influence. Not to mention the ancient history of africa itself is not exactly well studied or understood archeologically. Personally I'm not knowledgable enough on it to say for certain if they did or did not.
I think you understate just how isolated parts of Central and southern africa were. There was definitely some trade contact in these parts, some chinese pots(?) were found in Makumbugwe however there wasnt any evidence of direct contact with the chinese but they were still quite isolated unlike places in the horn or parts of the sahelian region. Yes, there were most certainly parts of subsaharan africa that were less isolated, when you mention trade through the sahara, yes, they did eventually find a way to get through the sahara with the introduction of camels but this happened much later than you made it seem.
In these types of discussions, people tend to get hung up on 'inventing' something, even though you can invent something and not utilize it as extensively as a group that adopts the technology. The Mayans had conception of the wheel yet did not make much usage of it, and more infamously europeans adopted gunpowder from the Chinese and arguably utilized it better at that time. I recall there may also be instances of people in parts of subsaharan africa being aware of the wheel conceptually but not having had used it, but I cannot cite a specific example for it so take that with a strong grain of salt.
Ignoring this, the wheel has only truly been invented, meaning created without a prior influence or conception, a number of times.
The reason I criticize your phrasing of the question is because you are essentially defending against a false premise, that precolonial africa did not have the wheel at all which may promote misunderstanding and misinformation and is often used, falsely, by some people, some with racist viewpoints, that tend to be skeptical of the environmental explanation. In my experience, they tend to underemphasize the role of trade and adopting technology in history and in some instances apply double standards, ignoring other groups of people that have been 'backwards or 'unadvanced' as if africa was the odd man out and no one else has been backwards either. I do think you were correct about the introduction of the camel as well as to how geography can play into what technologies people create or adopt.
I think a video from the TH-cam 'FromNothing' on the same topic provides similar explanations and points as you do but does still acknowledge and refute the idea that Subsaharan africa did not have the wheel at all.
It's such a pity we have that evil fly... because the waterways in West Africa are quite difficult to navigate... Waaaay harder than in Europe ...
Between the monsoon type seasons and relentless malaria (I've had it 10 times in my last year there) it's amazing that cities were able to develop there.... Not to mention genetic high blood pressure that kills otherwise strong & healthy adults... 🤷
And Aids. That's a killer and stunter of growth too
You guys can’t come up with insect repellent and anti malaria medication? How is it that the west was able to come up with that after only a few centuries of being exposed to these conditions?
The question of "why didn't x use something that was better?" often has a basic, but complex, answer. "Better for what purpose, in what conditions, and with the materials available?"
A simple answer is not wrong because it's simple. Often, the most cogent answer is the simple one.
The wheel has exceptional utility, this is obvious.
@@crazypantz3492 not in a river, or where there are no domesticated livestock to make full use of it, or on rocky terrain, etc.
@@henrydickerson9776 Ok, but what if you're taking what you're carrying from a place that's close to a river to a place that isn't close to a river? Would a wheel help then?
Yes. It would. And the wheel isn't reliant on a beast of burden, not that there's any reason you can't have beasts of burden in that region. There are various animals humans have adapted to their needs. Cows, horses, dogs, pigs etc.
It's like humans are these completely helpless creatures when it comes to this argument for you people.
And what are roads? You have heard of roads, I assume. You can have a certain terrain but build a little lane through it that has far more convenient surface.
These are arguments are a joke.
@@crazypantz3492 you try clearing a yard deep of granite with hand tools. I'll wait.
@@henrydickerson9776 What? are you saying the majority of sub saharan africa is filled with granite just below the surface?
I really like your thinking and the way you frame the issue. This might be another factor. Growing up in Michigan we ran around a lot on old Native American trails. They're exactly what anyone would think they are. narrow, no foliage in the track. And humans walking on them, imagine thousands of years of soft moccasins, don't wear them down very much. Hard soled shoes? Maybe a little be more. Pigs have trotters, like hooves - very hard. If you've ever followed a trail on Santa Catalina Island off southern California you'll find these absolutely typical trails, like in any National Park or the Native trails. You'll figure out they were made and used by pigs because low hanging branches cross the trail making them difficult for humans. So foot traffic - low impact.
Hiking the Wessex Trail in Dorsetshire, England, a >1000 year old path. It's generally much wider and sunken. Sunken means you are walking and to the side instead of an embankment of a slope, the pathway is cut down a meter. I figured out the difference near Nettlecombe Tout. There was a farm where I saw two teenagers on huge horses, at least as big as a Clydesdale. The trail near by that they rode on? Churned up like it had been harrowed. The thing is a wheeled cart would never have been practical on the Native American trails, most National Park trails (or the pig trails) but they'd have worked just fine in that horse trodden and eroded English trail.
When I was a kid I was really good with a wheel barrow (hundreds of pounds of sloshing wet concrete, skinny 12 year old running it on a 2 x12 bridge over a trench?), and we made all kinds of devices. The only wheeled device we ever used, or thought to use on a trail - was a bicycle. Of course I eventually got a mountain bike. This makes me think another area of inquiry might be in China. They invented more types of wheel barrow than anyone else. Did they ever use them on their narrow trails?
Thanks for your comment. I would assume the Chinese used their wheelbarrows on their trails but I don't know for certain. I've been reading up on wheelbarrows for a possible future video but haven't come across the answer to that yet.
@@premodernist_history if you're doing wheel barrows perhaps also consider the travois, or the Sioux word for a one person travois: wanjiksila (different word for a dog travois and a horse travois)
That's so cool! Thanks for sharing
Today I learned that, in fact, you DO NOT construct a camel . Another Great video 👏👏👏
Was camel ownership really that high in the sub-Sahara? Is the river always so nearby? Were natives in America and Australia also human enough not to invent the wheel? Why didn't Europeans use alpacas for main transportation?
Meso Americans had the wheel(concept and execution) based on mesoamerican toys dated back to precontact. But it wasn't used for transportation due to lack of draft animals
Natives in australia didn't invent the wheel either, and as the above commenter said, neither did the Natives Americans use wheeled transport. The wheel was invented exactly once in the old world, in either Mesopotamia or near the danube, all other human populations adopted it.
>is the river always so nearby?
There is a reason the vast majority of humans live near navigable waters whether riverine or coastal, rivers were absolutely vital not just for transport but as a source of water, very few humans would live apart from a major water feature of some kind
@@deeznoots6241 the true g.o.a.t are river and ship if we talking about human transport
I had recently heard the the primary use of "the wheel" in early history was for pottery instead of transport. Were pottery wheels a used tool in sub Saharan Africa?
Great video, very informative.
I heard that from John Green.
That's bullshit
Thanks! No, pottery wheels weren't used in sub-Saharan Africa.
Many West African cultures did use a wheel-like apparatus in the their textile looms (heddle pulleys).
@@premodernist_history I believe a simple version of the potter's wheel actually was used/invented by some of the cultures in southeast Nigeria.
Why would Europeans adopt the camel when they have a better alternative like horses/donkeys and mules. Which are faster easier to breed and can carry more?
As I said in the video, camels carry more. Their cruising speed is comparable to a donkey's, iirc. The people of the Middle East used carts and wagons pulled by donkeys and mules, and then they transitioned away from that to using camels as pack animals. I said that in the video.
I made a video on this exact topic a couple of years ago and I think you can gain some insight on the topic if you were to take a look. It's simply called: Why Africans Never Invented the Wheel."
I love how some people in the comments call this video "cope" without addressing ANY of the points. When they do try it is just them parroting misconceptions about African history. It reminds of how Robert Sephehr's fans response to videos that expose his lies.
But some africans did have wheels? It's just mostly not for transportation
@@Speedofdark339 He does say that in his video.
@@agentofchaos7456 Indeed.
Just saw the video (because I only just saw the comment). Good video!
Also, the camel was used ONLY in the north of africa who already wait for it... were familiar with the concept of the wheel.
No the camel is from horn Africa modern day Somalia and they also had wheeled carts and pulleys...
Then again the rest of Africa is walled of by climate and geography
They were used in the sahel too
@@skp8748But , they didn’t use it as a mode of transport
@@lucilianogueira3072 What do you mean exactly? Carts are literally for transportation.
love that you kept in the blooper where you said construct a camel
I remembered there was also a video stating that the Indigenous ppl in South America never used wheels. It wasn't because they were less advanced, considering that many of the toys there that their children played with had wheels(so they did come up the concept), but there was no actual way to implement it considering the terrain and other factors. They just didn't see a use for it🤷🏾♂️🤷🏾♂️🤷🏾♂️
Bullshit.
Chiefest of these disincentives being the lack of draft animals
@@pattonramming1988 also, mountains
Kinda hard to find a use for carts when it'll easily roll off a cliff if you look away for a second or slip on a bit of dust
Camels and alpacas are fantastic pack animals. That's like saying there is no domesticable pack animal in Africa. Yes there is and they are called zebras
Yeah, kinda sad nobody came up with the idea of pulleys and cranes in that era, that required the development of the wheel. Or maybe they did, but they didn't find those inventions practical for what they needed.
Great video.
Some things worth considering and looking into:
Sleds -- humans have used sleds for a very long time.
Chariots are essentially sleds with low friction skis
Also, the history of the domestication of the camel through birth control is fascinating
Wheels aren't low friction, they're articulated. Even if the overall effect is similar, wheels are actually extremely high friction by design, otherwise they'd have no grip.
hello, i just discovered the video, and i don't know if my respond is gonna make it up to you. First and furmostly, i wanna say that i am not a historian, archeologist, anthropologist or anything realated, by matter of fact, i am actually all the other way, on strong sciences as a student in physics. Nonetheless, as an African, mainly from the sahel and central african regions, i think there are one or two points that you didn't take into consideration,
1 - the first point is the fact that, most of africa, till really resently and even today some villages are really but autonomous settlements, that is villages back then where small settlemen of people that where self sustained, this is again more prevalent in the central part of africa, and they mostly made exchanges of goods and gifts, bribes and or to solify bonds and create new treaties. It was colonial rule that introduced the monocrop pattern of African economies, elevated cash-crops which could be exported over food crops, thus replicating the european conditions which led to the dependency of constant exchange of goods in other words "trade".
This means that, majority of african villages localy produced their sustainance, and thus there was no need for transportation of food related items.
2 - the second point that actually complement the point is that agriculture is adopted by africans very lately, either by the egyptians really latly or by the bantu which comes also relatively late. Taking into consideration that the wheel was invented with the advent of agriculture, it is not a surprise that, since agriculture was adopted relatively latly in africa, then the wheel too was most probably on his way, but taking his time. And the big issue is also the fact that the bantu region was a swanpy, mangroove region with high flooding and thick bush, this means the terain is really difficult, and impractible for such technology, reason why the european explorers really struggled to go inland.
3 - the third reason, which i think in a sense is the most important aspect, is the world view held by most african comuninties. While in other parts of the world, as in the middle east and the mediterenian region, where the phylosophycal and spiritual beliefs where "human centered" and there was a seperation between man and nature, From Genesis to Descartes, human power seems legitimate to have a hold on the planet;
- “Then God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that crawl on the earth. […] God created man and woman. […] And said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living creature that moveth on the earth.”
- Descartes says “to make us masters and possessors of nature”.
All this, are the fundamental components of a vision of the world completely breaking with paganism: while in africa, each tree, each spring, each hill had its own genius loci, its spiritual guardian, each animal was a conscious being, and man was just as part of nature as all other beings be them plant animals or even in animate objects. Thus when the middle eastern world view would have desecrated the world and allowed the exploitation of nature and mainly animals and plants, africans would "avoid" the exploitation of nature, taking what is needed and praying the ancestors and spirits for forgiveness and guidance.
i think this question in a sense is analogous to the question as to, why did some apes learn how to walk on two foots, while others not, and the response is those apes that where found in a dessertifying region had to invent a new walking method, while others who were save in forest didn't need to learn that, and perhabs it could be pointless to do so in the forest so they never really tried to.
and lastly just to point out, because i have seen many people making this confusion in the comments, when we say wheels, we mean a circular object, connected at the center to a bar and that revolves on an axle and is fixed below a vehicle or other object to enable it to move easily over the ground. There where many turnable devices in africa before the wheel, but not all turnable devices are wheels, most likey many turnable devices were used, but mayhaps not in the sense of a wheel
Many ancient armies used wagons with wheels to carry the supplies. Who knows how different things would be if the romans didnt have such great supply logistics (and great capacity due to wheeled vehicles)
Mules were far more important than wagons. Next was water ways and sea. Wagons were the least of their logistics assets.
The main beast of burden for the Romans was the Ox, not the horse or mule. Furthermore the Romans preferred means of transport was by boat. A wagon hauled by Oxen could haul a ton of supplies, but even in Roman days, Roman Ships and Boats could haul 40 tons, over longer distances and quicker then any Ox, Horse, Mule or Camel.
We're talking prior to the Marian Reforms or for resupply over longer marches here?
yet the parthian camel logistic shreaded Crassus in Mesopotamia, with their infinite Arrow supply. Roads and Wagons are great in a moderate climate. If you face off your armys in the desert, camels are kinda op.
@@williaminnes6635 Julius Caesar preferred mules but every other Roman Army used Oxen hauling wagons (and first choice was by ship or boat). I think Caesar used mules for he relied on the Rhone and Seine rivers and it is easer to haul Mules by ship then Oxen. Caesar also crossed the Rhine (by building a bridge) and the English Channel, in both cases if ships were used (Caesar clearly use ships only crossing the Channel) it was a lot easier to get mules on and off those ships. Remember Caesar did not stay in Britain or Germany that long.
On the topic of camels not being used in Europe - actually the Ottomans brought camels to South/Eastern Europe and they were used by the villagers in my country as recently as 100 years ago, but they were slowly replaced by horses.
"Why didn't Europe adopt the camel?" Because we had horses, far better suited to our climate
Camels are so good that as late as the 1860’s you had members of the US military arguing for their use
6:56 “Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Europeans are human beings”
What did he mean by this?
Its his way of telling us hes jewish
its most likely a jab to the europeans who make fun of black people by saying "hurr, durr, africans only slaves and mud huts.", though I can assume your average rational European would have figured that out, or be smart enough to ignore it.
@@TA-by9wv whats the problem with that?
There are other uses for wheels. Not just animals and vehicles. To say the development of camel tech and wheel tech are exclusive is a strange but interesting notion.
Uses like textile, pottery and machine parts for mass manufacturing
I didn't say they were exclusive.
@@sasi5841 When exactly did “mass manufacturing” come about?
@@sama847 Classical antiquity, and later on during the Early Modern period when manufactories began being built. Although monasteries often filled this role throughout the middle ages too.
@@userequaltoNull There were other methods of agricultural and material production that didn’t need the wheel.
Wheels are overrated, when there are no roads.
Even then, there's clear utility to wheels.
not really. they just never farmed, think how useful a wheelbarrow or plow would be for farming
@@feluto7172 Sub-Saharan Africans developed agriculture by en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology_in_Africa
Tell the ancient Egyptians that.
Reject the wheel,
Embrace Camel.
Great video - I would counter however that most transportation by cart (or at least a good deal) was historically pulled by hand (ie handcarts). The availability of domestic animals capable of pulling carts (oxen, horses, mules, etc.) Has always been limited by proximity and economic circumstance. Domestic animals are expensive to keep - they require food, shelter, and maintenance that make them valuable resources for duties to perform around a farmstead, such as plowing or powering a mill. In a given location known to have used the wheel during a chosen time period, we must ask ourselves if it would have been common for people of lesser means to even own domestic animals capable of pulling a cart. Or if they did, how often the one ox they may have kept could have been indisposed performing a separate task to that of carting around goods. We can only speculate as to how often this would have been the case, but I hope that I've made a decent enough argument that domesticated animals are not a necessary prerequisite to wheeled transportation.
I would be interested to learn when and where archeological evidence of wheels/domesticated animals first emerged, and if a significant causation can be extrapolated as to the invention of the wheel being a result of said domestication.
The real question is why arabs and berbers didn't used sleds more...
@@lloydgush High friction factor in dragging things on top of sand. After all, the polymeric property of it is why sand blasting rust off of metal is a thing. Friction can be lowered if you water the sand first - obviously not economical for a merchant caravan traversing goods across the Sahara. That's why snow and perhaps frozen mud are the only feasible conditions for mass adoption of sleds in transportation.
Wheeled transport was invented on the southern Russian steppe by the Proto-Indo-European people who were primarily cattle and horse herding pastoralists
It's not just the wheel the African tribes lacked. they also lacked glass and hard metal tools. It could be that like the wheel, glass and hard metal tools were also overrated, though certain people would beg to differ, like those who need glasses to see.
We're witnessing levels of cope we had not thought to be possible
Did you actually watch the video?
@@soarel325 just reacting to the title card for the luls
@@2013Arcturus This
The only one coping is you.
@@coronavirus553 None of us are coping. We’re laughing hysterically 😂
Constructing camels would require a high level of sophistication i think.
I see a lot of comments saying that this video is cope. But I don’t see many historically based counters to the thesis. Mostly just a lot of racism.
It makes me wonder who’s coping.
There is plently, you chose to ignore it. For example, how both the Africans and the Japanese adopted firearms, but only the japanese were able to counter-engineer them and produce them in a mass scale. Im sure the tse tse fly explains that too /s
His entire argument is based on a false comparison
@@EpicFilip that is a lie the many Sub-Saharan African states, especially in West Africa, ( Dahomey, Oyo, Benin, and Ashanti), manufactured their own guns, as well as their own gunpowder.
Number of African inventions: 0
@@orxy5316 another false lie
Not having spent 2 minutes studying African history I can tell you that any amount of weight a camel can CARRY is exponentially LESS that what it could PULL with a cart with wheels, which means less camels to feed.
and problems with sinking into the sand is by remedied by making wheels that are wide instead of narrow. They didn't make wheels because they didn't have an abundance of lumber ( a fact you also need not study Africa to know.) Did you...not...think of any of this? yeash.
I can not believe blud just said there arent enough trees in africa to make wheels.
@@binbows2258 XD you know what, that is MY fault for trying to word that in as brief a way as possible.
First, this guy is talking about specific areas of Africa and I was referencing that when saying "Africa".
Second I said "abundance of lumber" Yes they have trees, but not all trees are formed of wood that is the same in density, durability, ect. For example, you wouldn't make a pillar out of Balsa wood or use spruce to carve a statue.
The trees in the region he's referring to are generally thin, soft and wiry as opposed to say a pine or an oak tree. There's a reason the world gets it's lumber from areas with cold and wet environments. It's because that is the type wood that is far better suited to build or fabricate from.
Camels don't do well in Europe.
I am healing from the my latest bout with Covid and found this video. Best laugh of the week when you referenced that "camels are easier to construct." (Very informative as well.)
I know it's somewhat stereotypical to think of Africa as just a massive jungle, but, in the parts that are a dense jungle, I could see wheels being problematic as well.
And there are places where it isnt problematic.
@@CobraQuotes1 nobody lives in the savannah except wild animals, infact savannah is just like the steppe
@@samanth. Okay, Zulus and Mongolians don't exist according to you. Thank you for your insight.
@@samanth.Europeans are the descendants of steppe peoples, idgit
@@FifinatorKlon This comment section is just filled to the brim with intellectual giants xD No one lives in savannahs.. ahahaha my sides!
Who else came here from that one viral tweet?
Yo..
yeah haha
me lol
So they didn't have wheels because they didn't have roads. Looking forward to your video on why they didn't have roads.
He'd say they didn't need roads.
@@MS-ii1sv They didnt need roads because they didnt have wheels because they didnt have roads...
@@kalamar_from_slovakia Yeah. Why would you invent stuff you didn't need? People that invent things are the stupid ones.
Love how you turn it around from "Were Africans not bright enough to adopt the wheel?" to "Were Europeans not bright enough to adopt the camel?"
Europeans had horses, along with dozens of other domesticated animals that were used for a variety of purposes such as pulling the grinding wheel for a mill.
Very interesting about the tsetse fly and sleeping sickness. I was expecting you to make arguments about poor infrastucture, and how environmental, topographical and sociopolitical conditions made it more difficult to develop far-reaching and well connected road networks.
The tsetse fly was probably a big factor. Without the pulling power of large animals like cattle and horses, the usefulness of the wheel is very limited, especially in hot and wet tropical environments in which the wheel would get stuck without paved roads and animal power. Although very different, it is somewhat similar to the lack of the wheel in the Americas as they did not have access to horses or cattle to pull their heavy loads
@@nanopug Yeah I’m sure ancient Europeans could have invented vaccines back when they still believed in humors and were thought bad smells caused diseases.
@@nanopug how exactly do you fix that problem? its pretty hard to kill an entire species of fly especially if they can kill you if you interact with them too much
@@hueban1643 they did with malaria mosquito in USA such as Florida if they hadn't Americans in Florida would have been dropping off just like in western and central Africa today
Also the English were dying up to 50% in some of these places from disease and they still built the trade infrastructure they were there for. So even when disease was an issue. That was their approach.
Just want to point out the biggest difference between sub-saharan Africans and white Europeans has a lot to do with craftsmanship and I'm sure you can find fleeting examples of craftsmanship throughout sub-Saharan Africa though it will be to nowhere near the extent that Europeans have done so even before the industrial revolution this would have required ways of moving large suppliers of goods backwards and forwards as well as the ability to move finished products to market.
The fact that the white man was able to create an economy facilitating the necessity of the wheel or handcart compared to the fact that the black man couldn't facilitate an economy thus rendering him inert towards the invention of the wheel.
It's true that the European economy (including North Africa) in the Middle Ages was larger than the sub-Saharan African economy. But what do you mean by Europeans being "able to create an economy" of that size? Do you mean that Africans were constrained by their environment, or do you mean the Europeans had greater intellectual capacity?
@@premodernist_history I'm stating historical fact and am trying to remain objective, I don't care much for the reasons as to the differences between the two cultures, however the evidence clearly states that there is a difference between the cultures, I will add that the only time I brought up racial differences was in reference to your claims which are starkly more racist then I think you realise when compared to the standard argument that sub-Saharan Africans filed to invent the wheel due to a low IQ.
TLDR : I have no idea why Africans failed to develop active economy to the same scale as Europe, However this lack of an economy is one of the major reasons for them not inventing the wheel, There are clearly architectural differences as well as community differences all of which would have been aided by simple hand carts that the sub-Saharan Africans didn't find a need for and thus didn't invent.
Side note : Europe has always been successful economically, historically this is not even disputed, particularly southern Europe of course with trade from North Africa all the way from ancient Greece, ancient Mesopotamia, the empire of Carthage, the Roman Empire, the Seleucids empire, In a lot of these time periods we have no idea what the economy was like in sub-Saharan Africa and can only work off of the assumption that it was minuscule at best, with an extremely rare number of exceptions such as ancient Ethiopia, So please leave the only in the Middle Ages argument behind, It's simply incorrect
( At best you could argue that we have a lack of data and knowledge on sub-Saharan Africans for any particular time. The lack of archaeological digs and archaeological findings would make it impossible to verify my claim ).
Sorry for this being such a long post but I'm sure you can understand this is a highly sensitive subject I don't want to be misconstrued, but i hope this answers your questions.
Asia had a larger and more vibrant economy than Europe in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. So I guess Asians are superior to Europeans?
@@JasmineTeaEnjoyer Not just talking about East Asians. All of Asia had larger economies and more craftsmen making finer objects than Europeans could. Indians, Persians, Arabs, etc.
Also, I think you misspoke. East Asians wouldn't be honorary whites. Remember, the ASIANS are superior. The whites are inferior, remember? The ASIANS had the larger economy and are therefore superior. So if anything, it would be the whites being honorary Asians.
@@premodernist_history The Question is not about "superiority", the question is why wasn't the wheel invented in sub-Saharan Africa, if you're going to act like this then there is no knowledge here to be gained, just sound and you have become a perfect example of why academia has become the laughing stock of the intelligentsia.
Also Asia had no problem inventing the wheel.
I hope that this discussion can reclaim itself back to a more adult and intelligent conversation.
If wheels are overrated, why did every african country adopt them?
Modern civilization allowed the wheel to be vastly more useful, both to africans and to those who used camels - a la rubber for tires and the internal combustion engine
Because of evil colonizers
@@liquiddw2 Things is, if they aren't colonisers themselves, then the Nubians never ruled Egypt for 100 years.
That's true, there were black colonizers.
@@All_Hail_Chael Let's not give them too much credit. Egypt became weak after Roman conquest.
I think you're basically right, but there's 2 more cases you don't really cover (which is fine, but it's interesting to think about these edge cases)
1. wheelbarrows: western wheelbarrows are not long-transport tools, but useful for short-term transport of heavy goods. You'd think they'd be useful in African cities. Not sure why they weren't adopted in Africa, maybe just too niche. Chinese wheelbarrows seem like they would be even more useful anywhere you have relatively flat uncovered ground, and you can carry a decently large amount of goods without any pack animals. But the wet parts of Africa may have been too rough for their use without a major road-building plan.
2. There is a group of people who are nomadic and participate in agriculture, but do traditionally use wheel transports. In fact these people may have invented the wheel -- the inhabitants of the eurasian steppe. So there is a case for wheeled carts in non-agricultural societies. However I think the reason for this becomes clear when you look at the use of wheeled carts in eurasian steppe nomadic societies: they were used to transport their yerts/gers (made up of heavy timber and felt) when they traveled. In Mongolia, if you don't have an extremely heavily insulated tent overnight in winter, you will die; in Kenya you probably can use a much lighter tent, or sleep under the stars
Wheelbarrows really only appeared in Europe around the 12th century so the jump from wheel to wheelbarrow isn't as obvious as you might think, even to people who'd been using wheels and carts for centuries (if not millenia) at that point.
These are great points
In pre-colonial America, used especially by the Great Plains nations, there was something of a "wheelbarrow". It's called the travois. It didn't have wheels, and avoided the pitfalls of a wheeled vehicle in a land without roads.
This channel's comment sections are usually so enlightening and respectful, to come in and see mountains of racist comments on this video is disgusting
Have you considered crying about it?
@MLewisUT have you considered getting a new perspective on life outside of an Italian gas station?
Just came across your page today, I like it I think you have a good thing going here. I like that your videos aren't an hour long either. You get straight to the point in less than a half hour
Africans built the whole world, except Africa
If you don't have wheels, the countries with wheels get to name you.
lol that explains why Eastern European nations have names from Arabs who had no wheels.
Lmfaoo
@@anim8dideas849huh?
More modern day people should adopt the camel.
Agreed. They'd be great for off-roading.