The guy's name was Dr Dick Parry, and he wrote a book on it Engineering the Pyramids . Four pieces of wood on each side create wheel shapes.
Posted on 03/12/2012 9:01:18 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Wheels are the archetype of a primitive, caveman-level technology. But in fact, they're so ingenious that it took until 3500 B.C. for someone to invent them. By that time -- it was the Bronze Age -- humans were already casting metal alloys, constructing canals and sailboats, and even designing complex musical instruments such as harps.
The tricky thing about the wheel is not conceiving of a cylinder rolling on its edge. It's figuring out how to connect a stable, stationary platform to that cylinder.
"The stroke of brilliance was the wheel-and-axle concept," said David Anthony, a professor of anthropology at Hartwick College and author of "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language"... "But then making it was also difficult."
To make a fixed axle with revolving wheels, Anthony explained, the ends of the axle had to be nearly perfectly smooth and round, as did the holes in the center of the wheels; otherwise, there would be too much friction for the wheels to turn. Furthermore, the axles had to fit snugly inside the wheels' holes, but not too snugly -- they had to be free to rotate. [What Makes Wheels Appear to Spin Backward?]
The success of the whole structure was extremely sensitive to the size of the axle. While a narrow one would reduce the amount of friction, it would also be too weak to support a load. Meanwhile, a thick axle would hugely increase the amount of friction. "They solved this problem by making the earliest wagons quite narrow, so they could have short axles, which made it possible to have an axle that wasn't very thick," Anthony told Life's Little Mysteries.
The sensitivity of the wheel-and-axle system to all these factors meant that it could not have been developed in phases, he said. It was an all-or-nothing structure.
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificamerican.com ...
:’D
Indian archaeologists don’t all insist that, just the viciously nationalistic ones do. They also ridiculously claim that there was never an Aryan migration into India, even though the vintage literature says so, and records things that have been documented only in ancient sites in Central Asia. The same jokers have never shown even one site that exceeds 5K or 6K, other than run of the mill Neolithic sites, and even the earliest cities are mostly nameless, having not survived either in local tradition (because the population isn’t descended from the earlier occupants) or in the ancient literature.
There are small pyramid sites in Greece that are of early classical times, but some nutjobs insist on the entirely baseless claim that they are 20,000 years old.
For most of the past two million years, the continental shelf has been exposed during glaciation, while the interiors have been covered with ice. Hence, much if not most of what our ancestors did and where they lived is covered by water now.
This topic has generated the level of discussion I’d hoped it would; clearly the wheel is so obvious that it was independently invented a number of times, and used where needed and when appropriate. And sometimes lost or discarded, or declining into trivial uses.
What causes societies to retrograde or stabilize at subsistence level for centuries?
Actually, the horse, the camel and a whole bunch of other large (and a few small) mammals survived the (most recent) ice age and all went extinct in a very short period (possibly only a century or two) after the ice age ended.
A popular theory for why this occurred is that this is the period when humans first entered the New World and we wiped all these species out.
Unfortunately for the cool theory, there is increasing evidence men had been banging around America for thousands of years at this point. Possibly ten thousand or more. It also doesn't explain how horses, camels and other animals that went extinct after the ice age in America survived just fine in Eurasia, where they'd been hunted for much longer.
OTOH, we have excellent evidence of similar extinctions when humans first arrived in various Pacific islands, New Zealand, Madagascar and possibly Australia.
Do you have some links on this subject?
I’ve not paid much attention to these sometimes hyperbolic claims, I admit. They smack a little of Afro-centric (blacks invented everything!) and Russian commie (Russians invented everything!) “history” to me.
But I’m always willing to be convinced otherwise and the enthusiasm and axe to grind of some of the proponents does not invalidate evidence if it exists.
And I agree Indian history, for a variety of reasons, has been slighted in the standard histories.
different societies invented different things at different points in time. Case in point the Jarawas in the Andaman island haven’t yet discovered how to start fire.
Seems to me that if the idea was used, the major problem of exact placement would reman.
I wonder how the idea works with megatonage stone blocks - mass is mass and the effort needed, while less than hauling, would still be conciderable.
The ramp theory is another weakness since to get to the top, a properly sloped ramp would have to be so long as to exceed the space available on the plateau.
Until someone actually builds a full-sized, exact replica of a late pyramid, I continue to hold that there is no way to prove that the Egyptians were actually building new structures rather than repairing existing ones. Ancient Egyptians propaganda aside, an older non-local civiliztion from the First Time may have built them.
Just speculating.
I have long suspected that that artifact is a hoax.
How long do “western” scientists say humans go back, for one thing?
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If a western archaeologist makes a claim for Homo Sapiens Sapiens (modern man) older than 40,000 years, he treads dangerous academic grounds. This, despite DNA showing oldest female descent going back 250,000 years.
Would be nice to have a link about Indian archaeologists claims. Anyone? SunkenCiv?
Indigenous North Americans were in the Stone Age - they didn’t do metal.
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Actually that is a misnomer - the nates in North America mined and used copper - mostly for jewlry. Northern MI has extensive open copper mines going back a few thouand years.
Coinsidentally, the peak of the mining occurred precisely at the time copper usage peaked in on the other side of the Atlantic, where no mines have been found to equal the quantities used.
The guy's name was Dr Dick Parry, and he wrote a book on it Engineering the Pyramids . Four pieces of wood on each side create wheel shapes.
When the French came to build a fort in northern New York in 1700`s they asked their Abenaki and Iroquois allies where a good source of hard stone was so they could quarry it out for building the stone fort.
The Indians said, ``Follow us. They showed the French engineers 2 different sites only 1/4 of a mile apart that had been blasted out with hundreds of stone blocks some 6 long and wide and one was piled up like a small mountain of huge toy blocks.
The British showed this huge `pile of stones` on a 1758-9 map.
I saw one of the `stone mountains` and clambered all over it when I was a kid in 1940` s and the huge stone blocks were still there but they were removed to build dams etc in the 1960`s. The other one`s blocks evidently were removed to build the fort.
In California from Orinda to San Jose along the eastern shoreline hills of San Francisco Bay, a long stone wall that stands 12 feet tall is buried in the ground along the tops of the Oakland and Hayward hills along Barn Rock Road and other parts. Only the tops of the stones are visible.
A nun did a study of these features and it was published in the Oakland Tribune in the 1980`s with pictures>
The Ohlone Indians there say that this ``wall` was there when their ancestors came thousands of years ago. I saw the humongous blocks of stone on Barn Rock Road on the curve in the 1980`s-90`s dug up by the developers for housing projects in the hills. Many were used in the barns and houses there for foundations years ago before the developers got there. Figure that one out.
Exact placement is less a problem than it sounds. To start with, archaeologists have found a large stone mason site at the quarry used for the stones. The stones were accurately cut from the very start.
Egyptian stone masons were very adept at their craft, and had an assortment of cutting and grinding tools that were both simple and effective. I’ve seen some of their work in elaborate carving in diorite, one of the hardest minerals.
For example, to make a clean cut in a stone, they would use a string dipped in sand.
From the quarry village, they likely installed the eight wooden “wheel pieces”, so they could roll the block to the dock where the boats awaited. The boats were expendable and would take the cut stone downriver, and never return, so they were always replaced with new boats built upstream.
When the boats arrived at the point of the Nile closest to the construction site, they would roll the stones to the site.
Dirt ramp building was quite advanced for its time, and was so respected that it was still remembered and used by the Romans in their capture of Masada. That enormous dirt ramp still exists.
It was designed to handle heavy loads, as well as being used as an inclined plane, as I have suggested. That is, to have stuff dragged up it.
The horse-drawn farm wagons,and other wheeled machinery that I used during my pre-teen and teen years on Minnesota and Wisconsin farms were equipped with either a simple straight round steel shaft or, in the case of hay wagons, wooden or steel beams fitted with tapered cylindrical sleeves at each end around which the wheels rotated. None had ball or roller bearings, although that single tapered sleeve might be deemed a unitary roller bearing. Ha, Ha).
As for draft animals to pull a wagon, dogs have been used for that purpose, and American Indians used ponies, if available, in lieu of women and children to pull a pair of wooden poles (skids)on which folded-up tepees and housekeeping goods were piled. (Or so I’ve seen in the movies).
Why no wheel in new World -
Could be result of no domesticated animals to drive carts.
Also - keep in mind - you need to append with “not found yet”.
Though - personally - I don’t see how guys working with rocks never figured out a wheel barrow. Necessity being mother of invention - my bet is - they either had wheel barrow or substitute.
They needed it during their frequent plagues.
≤}B^)
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