The Ljubljana Marshes Wheel
The Ljubljana Marshes Wheel with its axle, the oldest wooden wheel yet discovered, found in Slovenia and dated to around 3130 BC.
Discovered in 2002 in the marshy ground outside Ljubljana and radiocarbon-dated to around 3130 BC, this ash-wood wheel is, at over 5,000 years old, the oldest wooden wheel found anywhere in the world, complete with its original oak axle. It was made by splitting a tree trunk into planks and joining them with wooden pegs, a level of carpentry that shows wheeled transport had already spread from wherever it was first invented — likely somewhere in Mesopotamia or the Carpathian region — to marshy settlements on the edge of the Alps within a few centuries. Wheels of this kind, paired with domesticated draft animals, transformed how early farming communities moved goods, people, and eventually armies.
CC BY-SA 4.0 — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
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