As we mentioned above, wheels were first invented around 3,500 B.C. That means that their invention post-dates the invention of agriculture, boats, and woven cloth. From a period standpoint, this puts the invention of wheels sometime between the Neolithic and Bronze age.

The invention of the wheel is a crowning achievement of early humans, but who actually invented it?

Ah, the wheel. The tool at the core of modern transportation, and so much more. The invention of the wheel has become a cultural trope, used to refer to prehistoric times, but did the wheel actually have an inventor?

We do have an "oldest wheel yet found." In 2002 Slovenian archaeologists uncovered a wooden wheel some 12 miles (20 km) southeast of Ljubljana. It was established that the wheel is between 5,100 and 5,350 years old. This makes it the oldest in the world used for transportation. A stone potter's wheel has been found at the Sumerian city of Ur, in modern-day Iraq, dated to about 3129 BC, and fragments of wheel-thrown pottery around 5,500 years old have also been discovered, evidence that the use of the wheel is even older — at least for pottery.

Who was the inventor of the wheel? Mesopotamian cultures are believed to have been the original inventors of wheels, though that premise is based solely on existing archaeological evidence. The Mesopotamian civilization used these early wheels for pottery creation. It was another 2,000 years or so before the Ancient Greeks developed the idea of the wheel enough to put them to use carrying loads.

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The first wheels and axle carts designed by the early Greeks were very basic in construction. They essentially consisted of just two rods, with a wheel and an axle on the end. They could be used to carry large loads through fields.

Since the oldest known wheels date to around 3,500 BC, that means that their invention post-dates the invention of agriculture, boats, and woven cloth. From a period standpoint, this puts the invention of wheels sometime between the Neolithic and Bronze ages.

One reason why it may have taken so long to invent the wheel is that wheels and axles are not found in nature. Tools like levers or pitchforks are based on things that occur naturally, such as forked sticks. Although tumbleweeds and dung beetles use rolling, rolling is of little practical use without an axle. 

The tricky thing about the wheel is not conceiving the notion of a cylinder rolling on its edge. It's figuring out how to connect a stable, stationary platform to that cylinder without impeding the cylinder's movement. Once early civilizations realized how much easier transportation would be with the wheel and axle, it becomes clear why the wheel was invented.