Beasts of burden

It all began with the horse. Or the camel. Or perhaps even the dog. No-one
really knows which animal prehistoric humans picked on first. People
tended to stay put, living more locally than they do now. If they needed to
move things about, they had to float them down rivers or drag them by
sledge. All that started to change when humans realized the animals
around them had raw power they could tap and tame. These "beasts of
burden" were the first engines.

Photo: Beasts of burden: animals were the original engines. Native Americans of the Blackfoot
Confederacy walk alongside a travois: two long poles crossed at the front to make a dragging frame that
can carry heavy loads. Photo courtesy of US Library of Congress.

By about 5000BCE, there were sledges and there were animal "engines"—
so the obvious thing to do was hitch them together. The Native Americans
were masters at this. They invented the travois: a strong, A-shaped
wooden frame, sometimes covered with animal skin, that a horse could
drag behind it like a cart without wheels. First used thousands of years ago,
the travois was still scraping along well into the 19th century.

The next big step was to add wheels and turn sledges into carts.
The wheel, which first appeared around 3500 BCE, was one of the last
great inventions of prehistoric times. No-one knows exactly how wheels
were invented. A group of prehistoric people may have been rolling a heavy
load along on tree trunks one day when they suddenly realized they could
chop the logs like salami and make the slices into wheels. However it was
invented, the wheel was a massive advance: it meant people and animals
could pull heavier loads further and faster.

Huge and heavy, the first solid wheels were difficult to carve and more
square than round. When someone had the bright idea of building lighter,
rounder wheels from separate wooden spokes, lumbering carts became
swift, sleek chariots. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all used
chariots to expand their empires. They were a bit like horse-drawn tanks.