Fossil Footprints In New Mexico Reveal The Oldest Known Handcart, Meaning People Used Them Thousands Of Years Before The Invention Of The Wheel
People often use shopping carts at the grocery store to carry their items. The ancient equivalent to this was a handcart without wheels dating back 22,000 years ago. It came before wheeled vehicles were invented in the Middle East around 5,000 years ago.
Recently, a team of researchers discovered some fossil traces at a site called White Sands in New Mexico. They were found among the oldest known human footprints.
The footprints are about 23,000 years old and offer hints of how people lived and survived in the region long ago.
Today, modern shopping carts can be seen rusting in rivers or ditches, but ancient versions were probably made of wood and have rotted away. But transport technology must have existed because people need to transport stuff.
While excavating for fossils at White Sands, the team stumbled upon drag marks made by the ends of wooden poles.
These poles were called a travois. Sometimes, the marks appeared as one trace. Other times, they showed up as two parallel traces.
The drag marks were preserved in dried mud and buried by sediment. Natural erosion and archaeological excavations finally revealed them. The drag marks continue for a while before disappearing beneath sediment.
They also overlap some human footprints, suggesting that the user dragged the travois behind them as they walked.
These features are usually associated with many other human footprints traveling in the same direction, and many of them seem to belong to children due to their size.
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The researchers conducted a series of tests on mud flats in Dorset in the United Kingdom and the coast of Maine in the United States.
They used different combinations of poles to recreate hand-pulled travois. In the experiments, the ends of the poles dragged along footprints in the mud in a similar way as the example in New Mexico.
It is believed that the footprints and drag marks demonstrate how resources were moved from the edge of what was once a wetland. Adults pulled the travois while children followed from the sides and behind.
The research team also worked with Indigenous peoples at White Sands to gain further insight into the findings. They interpreted the marks the same way. Some of the marks may have been created by dragging firewood, but this does not fit for all the existing marks.
Travois are known from historical records and accounts of Indigenous peoples. They were mostly pulled by dogs or horses. They represent early examples of the handcart but without wheels.
The first wheeled vehicle to appear in historical records was from Mesopotamia in 2500 B.C. They may have been constructed to transport meat from a hunting site or to help move camp.
The research was published in the journal Quaternary Science Advances.
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