12,000 Year Old Spindles: Did We Invent the Wheel in the Stone Age?
The wheel and axle is among the most important invention in human history. It transformed our ability to carry heavy loads, allowing for the large-scale transportation of goods from farmlands to cities. It directly supported the rise of urban centers, and through them the birth of civilization.
Traditionally it has been thought that the wheel was invented in the Bronze Age, emerging through a slow development process across the ancient world from India to Mesopotamia to China. But a new study by Talia Yashuv and Leore Grosman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem suggests that the wheel, or at least the concept may be far older.
The study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, focuses on the ancient Natufian culture and a particular village named Nahal Ein-Gev II near the Sea of Galilee. Found amidst the ruins are a surprising number of rounded pebbles, each with a hole through the middle and each clearly fashioned by humans.
Granted, these are not wheels for carts or chariots: they are far too small. But in concept they are the same, and this therefore appears to be early evidence of a wheel designed to use an axel.
The thing is, the Natufians are not Bronze Age but a much earlier culture dating to between 15,000 and 11,500 years ago in the Late Epipaleolithic. These are Stone Age wheels dated to around 10,000 BC, some 7,000 years earlier than had been previously thought.
The study theorizes that the pebbles may have been used as spindles whorls for spinning yarn. A spindle whorl acts as a weight fitted to a spindle which acts as a basic flywheel, its weight and momentum keeping the spindle spinning as the yarn is wound about it. Such whorls are common across many cultures throughout history, but none are anything like as old as these.
So far 113 such stones have been found at the site, including both completed stones with holes all the way through and unfinished stones with evidence of drill marks. Similarly sized pebbles are found locally, and it seems that the Natufians were picking the best candidates they could find and only reluctantly shaping them before driving a hole through the middle.
The consistency of size and shape of both the pebbles and the holes in them argues strongly that they were fashioned for a single purpose, and it is the fact that the holes are almost always at the center of the pebble with even weight distribution around them that argues for their use as a wheel.
This is, of course, not definitive and the study considers other possibilities for the uses of the pebbles. They could be beads, except they appear functional rather than decorative and we know what Natufian beads look like. They could be fishing weights, except limestone is a poor choice as it will dissolve in water.
They could be weights for a loom, except such a weight would not require the hole to be at the center and indeed the hole would be better served at one end. These other possibilities considered and rejected, leaving spindle whorls as the only other option.
The team even carried out a feasibility test by inserting a replica spindle into several of the stones. The thread produced with the inclusion of the pebble was stronger and more uniform than without, clear evidence that the Natufians could have seen the benefits of using them. And they certainly made a lot of these pebbles.
There is some evidence of spindle whorls from the later Neolithic, but this is uncertain. In any case, there is no clear chain of evidence linking these Natufian pebbles to later technologies, or indeed the apparent reinvention of the wheel and axel in the Bronze Age.
If true, this would present an isolated example of such a device in the far, far reaches of the Stone Age. It is entirely possible that humans invented the wheel much earlier than anyone had thought.
All images courtesy of PLOS ONE / Talia Yashuv; Leore Grosman.
Header Image: The pebbles were tested to see if they would make effective spindle whorls, and the yarn produced using them was superior to yarn produced without. Source: PLOS ONE / Talia Yashuv; Leore Grosman.
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