Jun 12, 2025 06:28 PM
(This post was last modified: Jun 12, 2025 06:36 PM by C C.)
6,000-year-old discovery finally reveals where & when the wheel was invented?
https://theconversation.com/how-was-the-...ago-244038
INTRO: Imagine you’re a copper miner in southeastern Europe in the year 3900 B.C.E. Day after day you haul copper ore through the mine’s sweltering tunnels.
You’ve resigned yourself to the grueling monotony of mining life. Then one afternoon, you witness a fellow worker doing something remarkable.
With an odd-looking contraption, he casually transports the equivalent of three times his body weight on a single trip. As he returns to the mine to fetch another load, it suddenly dawns on you that your chosen profession is about to get far less taxing and much more lucrative.
What you don’t realize: You’re witnessing something that will change the course of history – not just for your tiny mining community, but for all of humanity.
AI-generated image of a wheeled cart inside a mine tunnel.
An illustration of what the original mine carts used in the Carpathian mountains may have looked like in 3900 B.C.E. Kai James via DALL·E
Despite the wheel’s immeasurable impact, no one is certain as to who invented it, or when and where it was first conceived. The hypothetical scenario described above is based on a 2015 theory that miners in the Carpathian Mountains – in present-day Hungary – first invented the wheel nearly 6,000 years ago as a means to transport copper ore.
The theory is supported by the discovery of more than 150 miniaturized wagons by archaeologists working in the region. These pint-sized, four-wheeled models were made from clay, and their outer surfaces were engraved with a wickerwork pattern reminiscent of the basketry used by mining communities at the time. Carbon dating later revealed that these wagons are the earliest known depictions of wheeled transport to date.
This theory also raises a question of particular interest to me, an aerospace engineer who studies the science of engineering design. How did an obscure, scientifically naive mining society discover the wheel, when highly advanced civilizations, such as the ancient Egyptians, did not? (MORE - details)
Were the first kings of Poland actually from Scotland? New DNA evidence unsettles a nation’s founding myth
https://theconversation.com/were-the-fir...yth-258579
EXCERPTS: For two centuries, scholars have sparred over the roots of the Piasts, Poland’s first documented royal house, who reigned from the 10th to the 14th centuries. Were they local Slavic nobles, Moravian exiles, or warriors from Scandinavia?
[...] The male skeletons almost all carry a single, rare group of genetic variants on the Y chromosome (which is only carried and passed down by males). This group is today found mainly in Britain. The closest known match belongs to a Pict buried in eastern Scotland in the 5th or 6th century.
These results imply that the dynasty’s paternal line arrived from the vicinity of the North Atlantic, not nearby.
The date of that arrival is still open: the founding clan could have migrated centuries before the first known Piast, Mieszko I (who died in 992), or perhaps only a generation earlier through a dynastic marriage. Either way, the new data kill the notion of an unbroken local male lineage.
Yet genetics also shows deep local continuity in the wider population. A separate survey of Iron Age cemeteries across Poland, published in Scientific Reports, revealed that people living 2,000 years ago already shared the genetic makeup seen in early Piast subjects.
Another project that sequenced pre-Piast burials drew the same conclusion: local Poles were part of the broader continental gene pool stretching from Denmark to France.
In short, even if the Piasts were exotic rulers, they governed a long-established community... (MORE - missing details)
https://theconversation.com/how-was-the-...ago-244038
INTRO: Imagine you’re a copper miner in southeastern Europe in the year 3900 B.C.E. Day after day you haul copper ore through the mine’s sweltering tunnels.
You’ve resigned yourself to the grueling monotony of mining life. Then one afternoon, you witness a fellow worker doing something remarkable.
With an odd-looking contraption, he casually transports the equivalent of three times his body weight on a single trip. As he returns to the mine to fetch another load, it suddenly dawns on you that your chosen profession is about to get far less taxing and much more lucrative.
What you don’t realize: You’re witnessing something that will change the course of history – not just for your tiny mining community, but for all of humanity.
AI-generated image of a wheeled cart inside a mine tunnel.
An illustration of what the original mine carts used in the Carpathian mountains may have looked like in 3900 B.C.E. Kai James via DALL·E
Despite the wheel’s immeasurable impact, no one is certain as to who invented it, or when and where it was first conceived. The hypothetical scenario described above is based on a 2015 theory that miners in the Carpathian Mountains – in present-day Hungary – first invented the wheel nearly 6,000 years ago as a means to transport copper ore.
The theory is supported by the discovery of more than 150 miniaturized wagons by archaeologists working in the region. These pint-sized, four-wheeled models were made from clay, and their outer surfaces were engraved with a wickerwork pattern reminiscent of the basketry used by mining communities at the time. Carbon dating later revealed that these wagons are the earliest known depictions of wheeled transport to date.
This theory also raises a question of particular interest to me, an aerospace engineer who studies the science of engineering design. How did an obscure, scientifically naive mining society discover the wheel, when highly advanced civilizations, such as the ancient Egyptians, did not? (MORE - details)
Were the first kings of Poland actually from Scotland? New DNA evidence unsettles a nation’s founding myth
https://theconversation.com/were-the-fir...yth-258579
EXCERPTS: For two centuries, scholars have sparred over the roots of the Piasts, Poland’s first documented royal house, who reigned from the 10th to the 14th centuries. Were they local Slavic nobles, Moravian exiles, or warriors from Scandinavia?
[...] The male skeletons almost all carry a single, rare group of genetic variants on the Y chromosome (which is only carried and passed down by males). This group is today found mainly in Britain. The closest known match belongs to a Pict buried in eastern Scotland in the 5th or 6th century.
These results imply that the dynasty’s paternal line arrived from the vicinity of the North Atlantic, not nearby.
The date of that arrival is still open: the founding clan could have migrated centuries before the first known Piast, Mieszko I (who died in 992), or perhaps only a generation earlier through a dynastic marriage. Either way, the new data kill the notion of an unbroken local male lineage.
Yet genetics also shows deep local continuity in the wider population. A separate survey of Iron Age cemeteries across Poland, published in Scientific Reports, revealed that people living 2,000 years ago already shared the genetic makeup seen in early Piast subjects.
Another project that sequenced pre-Piast burials drew the same conclusion: local Poles were part of the broader continental gene pool stretching from Denmark to France.
In short, even if the Piasts were exotic rulers, they governed a long-established community... (MORE - missing details)