Did miners invent the first wheel? Computer models suggest yes

Posted: March 21, 2025

Who invented the first wheel—and what did they use it for? Cultures in southern Mexico had wheels at least as early as 700 BCE. There are pictures of now-extinct wild asses pulling wheeled military vehicles in Iraq in 3,000 BCE. Now, historians have used computational simulations to argue that the unique engineering challenges of copper mining spurred ancient miners in the Carpathian mountains— around southern Ukraine and Slovakia—to first invent the wheel as early as 3,900 BCE. 

Most of us are used to using wheels on cars and bicycles in our everyday lives, so it seems obvious that early humans would have invented wheels to travel overland—especially once they had domesticated horses, which they probably did around Kazakhstan, Ukraine and the northern Black Sea around 3,500 BCE. 

But, the historian of technology, Richard Bulliet, argues that, even with horses, wheels are not that useful for overland travel without roads. Natural terrain is full of bumps, rocks, holes, logs and other obstacles that threaten to mire or destroy all but the most durable wheels with very large diameters.

Bulliet argues that the mining paths excavated into the Carpathian mountains by the first miners created the first engineered surface that made wheels a practical invention. Recently, he teamed up with computational engineers to create computer simulations that use what we know about both history and physics to demonstrate that the theory makes sense. 

Why the first copper-age miners needed wheels  

Before humans discovered that alloying copper and tin created a durable metal for tools and weapons and entered the Bronze Age, they had already started fashioning objects out of pure copper. 

At multiple sites around the world, from Michigan and Wisconsin around the Great Lakes, the Andes mountains in South America, and the Balkan mountains around Bulgaria, cultures started working highly concentrated copper deposits, which they found near the surface, around 7,000-6,000 BCE. In Eastern Europe, as surface deposits ran low, cultures in the Carpathian mountains started to dig further into the ground in search of more copper. 

As they mined further underground, the concentration of copper decreased. They started having to mine tons of ore just to get a few pounds of copper. They needed some way to move massive quantities of ore out of the ground. Just hauling that much ore out in baskets over their backs would have become impractical. 

But, mine paths dug out of the earth, compacted by tons of copper ore moving over them day after day, provided just the sort of conditions for which wheels would be useful: a smooth, straight, hard surface without obstacles. Mine tunnels and trenches were accidental roads.  

Bulliet thinks that it was by trying to find the best way to carry heavy loads over these mining paths that prehistoric engineers hit upon the idea of the wheel. His research shows the hypothesis isn’t just idle speculation. 

Archaeological evidence for the first wheels in Eastern Europe

Archaeologists haven’t found any prehistoric mining carts or wheels from the Copper Age in the Carpathian mountains. But, they have found about 150 clay drinking cups at multiple sites in the region made by the Boleráz culture around 3,600 BCE. And those drinking cups have wheels. 

The cups are about the size of a modern coffee cup, but are cube-shaped, like a mine cart, with a looped handle on one side—and wheels on the bottom. Bulliet gives three reasons to think that the cups are miniature versions of carts used to remove ore from copper mines. First, the cups don’t have any place to yoke or harness an animal. That would make sense if they represent carts used in mines, where passages would be too narrow to drive draft animals. Some of them also have hatch marks on their sides, which may represent the basketry known to have been used in ancient mines. 

Finally, the wheels on the cups are technically called wheelsets: the wheels are rigidly attached to the axle on either side rather than left free to rotate on the axle itself. A wheelset would work perfectly going up and down a mine path in a straight line. But, it would not function well traveling overland, as it would be difficult to turn. To make turns in a wheeled vehicle, the right and left wheels need to rotate independently at different rates on the axle. 

Bulliet thinks the Boleráz people were so proud of inventing wheeled mine carts that they drank out of mini mine carts in celebration. They “discovered that they could move ore more efficiently using a wheel, and then they celebrated their own achievement. And so the primitive mine carts that they developed became a point of cultural pride,” says Bulliet. 

Did the wheel evolve from rollers?

Bulliet hypothesizes that ancient miners started rolling baskets of ore over rollers—logs laid down between the basket and the ground. But, walls on either side of mining paths made it difficult to remove rollers from the rear of the basket and then pass them back up to the front as the basket rolled forward.

So, Bulliet thinks the miners engineered semi-circular sockets on the bottom of mine baskets that the rollers could slot into. With sockets, each basket would pull its own rollers along with it as it moved. But those sockets would have caused friction against the rollers, making it more difficult to move the mine carts. Could ancient miners have figured out that turning rollers into wheels would solve this problem? 

How computer simulation gives evidence for the wheel’s invention

To get answers, Bulliet turned to computational engineers Lee Alacoque and Kai James. They created an algorithm that predicts how small changes to the design of a basket with sockets on rollers could make it more durable and require less force to move. 

The algorithm has three components: 

1. A simulation tool predicts how a design will respond to massive loads on a hard, straight path: how it might bend, or whether it will break and how.
2. Another module calculates how much effort is required to move a heavy load using the design.
3. An optimizer takes the answers from the first two modules and modifies the design slightly to get a new design that’s more durable and efficient. 

The algorithm then takes the new design the optimizer generates and feeds it back into the program over and over again until the algorithm finally settles on a design that is optimally efficient and durable. 

The optimal design the algorithm settled on after hundreds of iterations was, as James describes it, “a slender axle capped on either end by two round discs, which we now refer to as ‘wheels.’” 

James reasons that it would have made sense for the early miners to cut grooves into the rollers in order to grease them and reduce the friction introduced by the sockets. Then they may have started narrowing the center of the rollers so that they could clear bits of rock or other debris on the mine path. They then could have realized that they could keep making their ore baskets easier to pull by making their axles smaller and their wheels bigger. 

If this theory is correct, the invention of the wheel may not have been a single “Eureka!” moment. Instead, scrappy prehistoric engineers invented the wheel by gradually trying to optimize the efficiency of their mining transport systems. Seemingly without writing or mathematics, they beat out highly mathematically sophisticated societies, like the Egyptians.  

These days, computational engineering simulations can help us speed up this process to engineer the next advances in mining technology faster than those pre-historic Carpathians could have dreamed. 

Get the details on the engineering algorithm in Alacoque, Bulliet and James’ paper, Reconstructing the invention of the wheel using computational structural analysis and design.

Hear interviews with Bulliet and James on The ancients: Origins of the wheel.