Did Sub-Saharan Africans ever invent the wheel on their own?

by diegoo2
8BallTiger

No. Very few places/peoples on earth actually "invented" the wheel. /u/Daeres , one of the mods, has a lengthy post on it http://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2bgqyf/carts_cereals_and_ceramics/. But here is the section on the wheel specifically

One is a specific one to our particular protagonist, who asserts that the wheel is a basic technology. I will have to be generous here and assume that they don’t mean wheel shaped objects, but something that is used in combination with other things as an actual method of assisted locomotion (wheels can move without assistance, but surprisingly rarely is this accomplishing much that’s useful). To my knowledge, the use of wheels for transport has been developed at best twice, and quite probably just once; the certain candidate for now appears to be a relatively small part of western Central Asia, and the possible other candidate is part of Central Europe, but the appearance of the wheel in both areas is so contemporary that’s possible that it represents one phenomena, or that one predates the other. This is a technology that then had to spread throughout the entirety of continental Eurasia, and much of Africa. The Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians Hittites, and Mycenaeans did not invent chariots. The Chinese did not invent chariots. The ancient Britons did not invent chariots. The Romans did not invent chariots. The ancient peoples of India did not invent chariots. Every single one of these famously complex societies was reliant on the invention developed in one part of the world. None of these people were ‘smart enough’ to sit down by themselves and realise that wheels can work when going across flat areas. Does this make the ancient Babylonians stupid? Does this make the precursors to the ancient Greeks stupid? Does this make China’s ancient cultures and societies stupid? The use of wheeled transport does not, it seems to my non-engineer brain, seem to be an intuitive piece of reasoning whatsoever. In addition, if Subsaharan Africa (in any of the three earlier definitions) is full of ridiculously large flat areas, somebody maybe ought to tell the enormous, malaria-infested rainforests that dominate Central Africa so that they can find new gainful employment. Or the mountains that rear from the earth like a great crocodile under most of East Africa, right up to the earlier mentioned home territory of D’mt and Aksum. Oh, certainly there were flat bits in Africa, but by asking them to independently develop the wheel you are setting them a task that only at best two places in the entire world have matched, and we don’t even know the names of the people/s that achieved this feat. I don’t think the wheel as a mode of transport looks so simple as our protagonist suggested.