Wheels

We listened to a structural engineer talking about key inventions that changed the world; inevitably, one of them was the wheel. The engineer was irked by people who say that we shouldn't re-invent the wheel - pointing out that the wheel has been re-invented many times throughout history. As a prime example, they cited the fact that the first known wheel was in Mesopotamia - the fabled cradle of civilisation beetween the Tigris and Euphrates, where settled agriculture is said to have begun. There, they used wheels to create pottery in which to store the grain that they had learned to farm and harvest

The engineer said that the oldest wheeled vehicle to be discovered dated from a thousand years later  (I'm a bit sceptical about the dates, but it's a fair point that this extreme re-purposing amounts to re-invention). The vehicle in question was found in the region north of the Black and Caspian seas, built by the civilisation that mastered not only wheeled vehicles, but the domestication of the horse and the use of cattle as a source of food. These technological advantages allowed them to spread across most of western Europe and much of southern Asia, bringing with them the language that developed into all the languages of the Indo-European language group, which includes Greek, Latin, Persian, Hindi, Sanskrit, and the Germanic languages, including English

This links neatly to a newspaper report that the organism that caused bubonic plague has been found in the teeth of people who died around the time that Stonehenge was built - thousands of years earlier than the disease had been previously known. Stonehenge was built by people who migrated to Britain from somewhere around modern Turkey, and replaced the original hunter-gatherer inhabitants. The 'Turkish' settlers were farmers, and highly successful for over a thousand years, but then rapidly vanished, to be replaced by the migrants from the steppes, with their wheels, horses, cattle and alien tongue - and with distinctive drinking vessels: they are often called 'the beaker people'

The discovery of plague bacteria now leads archaeologists to speculate that the disease may have had as significant a role in the decline of the henge-builders as warfare and conquest by more technologically advanced invaders on wheels

The picture is a classic Oxford scene - but actually it is in Stratford-upon-Avon. The background has four of the fourteen arches of the Clopton bridge (funded by Mr Clopton), built in 1484 to replace an earlier wooden one. It's been repaired a few times in 550 years, of course, including in 1642, to replace an arch that had been destroyed to stop Cromwell's army, and their wheeled vehicles, crossing it. Soon afterwards, they also increased the height of the parapets - perhaps the 10cm ones they had until then had failed to stop few wheels going over the side!