One thing that has always interested me is the "Case of the missing inventions".
Sometime, about 10-20,000 years ago, people moved from EurAsiaAfrica to the Americas. This was the last of the great migrations (long after the migration of the sea peoples to the islands of the South Pacific and Australia/New Zeland). These people, those in the Islands and those in the Americas were effectively cut off from the vast populations of the older continents.
From the evidence left by the earliest of these wanderers we can see that they were very similar at the time of migration to folks anywhere else. Technologically, they had all the things the others had, stoneworking, fire, cooperative societies. We can also see similar intellegence and a very similar growth pattern, they built cities, invented govenments, studied the skies, discovered and charted planets and stars, developed languages and writing.
But there are three inventions that were made on the old land mass that were never duplicated in either the Island peoples or the Americas. And those three inventions made all the difference.
The first is the wheel. Neither the Islanders or those in the Americas ever invented the wheel. Even the potters wheel was unknown and we see this in the pottery shards found throughout the area. They made pots and utensils but they were all slab and coil, much slower to make and so far more valuable. Pottery never became a commidity item.
The second great missing invention is the bellows. This simple device was esential if man was to move beyond the softer hammered metals, copper, and utilize Iron or high strength bronze. Without a bellows mankind was limited to stone as the best and sharpest cutting instrument and when Europeans arrived in the Americas they found a people still effectively in the stone age.
The third and perhaps biggest missing invention is the draught animal. The two closest examples found in the Americas are the domesticated llama used as a pack animal and the dog sledge in the far north or the travois. This lack of draught animals limited what could be done to human power alone. It was sufficient for creating magnificent edifices but limited farming. The peoples of the Americas never made the jump from lever as digging stick to the plow.
Why were these three things NOT reinvented when so many other things were?
I don't have a clue where this might go
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