people have this tendency to view the wheel as a benchmark of human development.
and i feel like people forget just how many parts of the world didn't use wheels consistently until the last couple of centuries
like. not because they were "primitive" or hadn't thought to invent it, but because there are terrains and regions where wheels just aren't useful. in deserts. on islands. in places with a lot of bog or heavy snowfall.
in the upper pennines, wheeled carts only came into common use when the coal industry grew in the 18th century and the gravity train was developed. until then, roads were too hard to maintain and most people just used horses, mules, or sleds for heavy transport.
in argyll and the west of scotland, where mountain terrain hits the coast and where the lochs mean that there is a lot of coast, it is much easier to use boats and rafts than to try to transport freight overland. so small freight was similarly carried by livestock or dragged, and only as far as the nearest body of water.
in the southern fens (before they were drained) rafts were more common than carts, usually being dragged over mud and bog rather than floating in deep water.
and it is relevant to note that all of these were in England and Scotland, places which had, on aggregate, been using wheels since the neolithic. none of these places failed to invent the wheel. they just uninvented it. because it was useless. other cultures in broader terrain areas (like the steppes, or the deserts, or the Arctic) may never have invented the wheel at all, bc, like, why would you? it's useless.
and. idk. i think about that a lot when people talk about progress and universal human development. it puts me in mind of a book from the 1860s i read that was like "and those backwards people in subsaharan africa haven't even thought to invent doors! on an unrelated note all the houses we, the Enlightened Whites, build in the area are unbearably hot and full of flies. wonder what that's about." like. wow. you really are just of the belief that the ideal technological development looks the same wherever you are, huh?
The wheel is invented by most human cultures.
They used it for pottery. They used it for children's toys. They used it for spinning thread. They used it to turn a spit while cooking. They attached it to a box with handles and used it to carry supplies to and from the battlefield. They stuck it in water and used it to power a mill. They made it out of rock and spun it to sharpen blades. They made them tiny and put them on necklaces.
The wheel's a very useful device and it got invented for a thousand purposes, some common to many cultures, some limited to just a few.
They didn't use it for transport until they they had roads.
And a lot of terrain does not take well to roads, not without a whole lot of time and money being spent by someone other than local farmers. You need a whole lot of people using the exact same route, over and over, to justify the hassle and expense of building & maintaining a road that's faster to navigate with wheels than by either loading your stuff on a string of donkeys, or dragging it behind them on a blanket stretched between two poles.
They didn't "fail to invent the wheel"; they failed to invent the ox-drawn cart. Because they had nowhere to use it.
