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An account of historical causes and effects is hard. We should not attribute the lack of roads to the lack of wheels, the author writes. Wheels and roads develo
by soyiuz 9y ago
An account of historical causes and effects is hard. We should not attribute the lack of roads to the lack of wheels, the author writes. Wheels and roads develop "in parallel." Yet he comes back to the "inefficient harness" as the cause of the wheel dying off. If indeed there was competition between "horse + harness + wheel" and "camel," why wouldn't a culture produce "camel + harness + wheel?" I am unconvinced by the reasoning here.
- lmm 9y agoNo-one's ever been able to come up with a simple but efficient harness for a camel; there are no known pre-19th century ones. Whereas the horse collar is fundamentally just a padded loop, and was invented independently in Europe and China at least.
- gambiting 9y agoWhat it the reason for that?
- lmm 9y agoI assume accidents of physiology.
- sandworm101 9y agoHorse collars are far more than padding. That they are solid, not loops of rope, means that the animal can push hard against them without choking itself.
- jacobolus 9y agoFrom what I remember early horse collars would choke the animals, and more sophisticated ones were a big deal invention in late first millennium Europe (or maybe introduced to Europe at that point from contact with Asians?). This was one reason oxen were used as draft animals in preference to horses.
- scroot 9y agoBulliet has an entire book ("The Camel and the Wheel") in which he takes great care to address this point. As another reader has pointed out, harnessing camels is much more difficult than harnessing a horse, and camels are not good draught animals. Bulliet recently published his history of the Wheel, which is excellent ("The Wheel: Inventions and Reinventions"). I highly recommend it. I'll also add that Bulliet's "Hunters, Herders, & Hamburgers" – though unfortunately titled – is one of the best books around on the history of animal domestication.