This has always puzzled me. Such an important invention, yet such a simple concept. It baffles me that humans have lived for hundreds of thousands of years but we only started using the wheel less than ten thousand years ago? I admit that the wheel is a pretty ingenious concept, but surely Stone Age men saw fruits rolling on the ground, yet for hundreds of thousands of years, the wheel was not invented.
What use is a wheel to Stone Age man? We think of the wheel as a great labour-saving device. But wheeled vehicles are heavy, especially before the spoked wheel was invented. Cross-country vehicles need larger wheels, and are heavier than equivalent road-bound vehicles.
Before animal traction was invented, wheeled vehicles were human-powered. This means that if you, Stone Age forager (hunter-gatherer) or (in the late Stone Age) farmer, want to use your hand-cart, you need to push or pull it yourself. Across rough ground, uphill, cross streams with it, etc. So the question: if you were to go deer-hunting, on foot, would you take a wheelbarrow or handcart with you, to better carry the deer if you catch one?
Of course, you would also need to put in the effort to make and maintain the vehicle, with stone tools. One of the better choices of design would be something like old-fashioned Vietnamese wheelbarrows:
These have a single solid wheel - solid wheels are easier to make than spoked wheels (especially before the spoked wheel is invented!), and one wheel is easier to make than two or more. This example is modern, and made using steel tools, and has some steel parts. The Stone Age version would take much more effort to make, but the basic design is feasible.
Vehicles like this made an invaluable contribution to the Viet Minh victory over the French (logistics matters!). But this was in different circumstances - traffic density was high enough so that simple roads and bridges could be built, and the vehicle would spend at least half the journey with a full load (e.g., taking ammunition or food to Dien Bien Phu, even if it was empty on the return journey), and the porters did not need to build their own vehicles. Less useful for the Stone Age forager!
After the domestication of cattle, heavy-duty animal traction was available, and heavy cross-country carts and/or wagons became feasible. But you still need a load that justifies a wagon rather than simply using pack animals. So you need to own a lot of heavy stuff, and still need to move. Thus, eventually, we find steppe nomads using heavy cross-country wagons, apparently as mobile homes. This might have been the earliest practical use of the wheel. (Another likely one is for mine-cars in the Balkans.) This use continued for thousands of years into modern times - definitely practical. But note that the speed was not high, and didn't need to be high - it was sufficient to move at the speed of the other animals (the sheep, cattle, etc.).
Commercial cargo carrying benefits from speed - if for nothing else, to reduce the cost of feeding the draught animals and paying the drivers. For this, roads are good. But roads are expensive to build and maintain. Depending on the loads being carried, and the pack animals available, wheeled vehicles might not outcompete pack animals (especially when road building and maintenance is included). Significantly, much of Western and Central Asia largely abandoned the wheel after (a) horses suited for riding made the chariot less important as a military weapon, and (b) the camel became available as an efficient pack animal. Sometimes the wheel loses against simpler technologies.
TLDR: The wheel is only a labour-saving device if it saves labour.
This is largely an expanded version of https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cn8tlb/i_did_some_looking_around_and_found_that_wheels/
Further reading: