Obviously, North, South and Central American civilizations did not use wheels. Nor did Australia or the Pacific Islands. So, was the wheel invented in Europe, Asia or Africa?
Someone who wanted to torture all the wives of soccer playing, soccer watching, soccer coaching fanatical men!
The wheel had no beginning. It has ben here the whole time.
Appears to be Poland. wikipedia: Evidence of wheeled vehicles appears from the mid 4th millennium BCE, near-simultaneously in Mesopotamia, the Northern Caucasus (Maykop culture) and Central Europe, and so the question of which culture originally invented the wheeled vehicle remains unresolved and under debate. The earliest well-dated depiction of a wheeled vehicle (here a wagon—four wheels, two axles), is on the Bronocice pot, a ca. 3500–3350 BCE clay pot excavated in a Funnelbeaker culture settlement in southern Poland. The wheeled vehicle from the area of its first occurrence (Mesopotamia, Caucasus, Balkans, Central Europe) spread across Eurasia, reaching the Indus Valley by the 3rd millennium BCE. During the 2nd millennium BCE, the spoke-wheeled chariot spread at an increased pace, reaching both China and Scandinavia by 1200 BCE. In China, the wheel was certainly present with the adoption of the chariot in ca. 1200 BCE, although Barbieri-Low argues for earlier Chinese wheeled vehicles, circa 2000 BCE. .
According to archaeologists, the wheel was probably invented around 8,000 B.C in Asia but the oldest wheel as we know it dates back to Mesopotamia in 3,500 B.C. The invention of the wheel leading to today's caster wheel can be broken down into six stages: 1) Objects were placed on a roller similar to a log, used to roll heavy objects easier. 2) Then they placed runners like a sled, under a heavy load to drag it and this was called, a sledge. 3) Later, the sledge and the roller were combined to move objects farther by alternating one roller with a second roller and repeating the process as they moved an object forward. 4) As the sledge runners wore grooves into the rollers, men realized that the grooves helped to move the load a greater distance before the next roller was needed. 5) Eventually, the rollers were changed into wheels and in the process, the wood between the grooves of the roller were cut away to form an axle and wooden pegs were fastened to the runners on each side of the axle. When the wheels turned, the axle turned in the space between the pegs and the first cart was invented. 6) The cart's axle and wheels were made to move separately and by 2000 B.C. the Egyptians made chariots with spokes in the wheels. Of course today the wheel has undergone drastic transformation from a simple wooden wheel to wheels of various sizes and various materials to move loads from Point A to Point B.
