Twelve-thousand years ago, people in a coastal village in the Levant used stone weights on their spindles to spin thread faster and more evenly—and, some archeologists are arguing, in the process they pioneered the basic mechanics that eventually made cart wheels possible.
Archaeologists found hundreds of perforated, roundish, flattish pebbles in the 12,000-year-old village of Nahal Ein-Gev II, all with neat holes drilled in their centers. Based on their uneven appearance and their varied sizes, it seemed that these weren’t beads, but spindle whorls: a flywheel-like piece that makes a drop spindle spin faster and more steadily. The find is the oldest known evidence of a newfangled textile production technology called the drop spindle. But it may also have been a distant precursor to the wheel. According to archaeologists Talia Yashuv and Leore Grosman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, drop spindles work on the same mechanical principle as the earliest wheels, which show up on carts around 6,000 years ago during the Bronze Age.
“Circular objects with a hollowed center connected to a bar make one of the most important inventions of all time,” write Yashuv and Grosman in their recent paper. “At the core of it all, the importance of the wheel and axle lies in a relatively simple rotational mechanism capable of transforming linear to rotary motion and vice versa.”
Common thread connects spindles and wheels
People have been spinning plant fibers, like flax, into thread for (at least) tens of thousands of years; the first people to do this that we know of were Neanderthals living in what’s now France. One way to spin a yarn is just to lay a few fibers on your thigh and roll them so they twist together. But a faster way—which also makes more even thread—is to attach the fiber to a stick with a weight on the end (a spindle with a whorl), then drop the whole thing and give it a slight twist on the way down. The whorl helps turn the vertical motion of the drop spindle into rotation, which twists the fibers together. And every few feet, you can stop and wrap the spun fiber around the spindle. It’s simple but brilliant, and now it turns out that people have been spinning fiber this way since at least 12,000 years ago.
It’s not so much that the spindle whorl was the direct evolutionary ancestor of the wheel, the way wolves were the ancestors of modern dogs. Instead, it was one of the first ways that people got really familiar, in a hands-on way, with the idea that you can attach something round to a stick and use it to turn one kind of motion into another. Pottery wheels, which emerged a bit later, work on the same general principle.
“I don’t jump to saying, ‘Okay, spindle whorls are [cart] wheels,” Yashuv tells Ars. “In many studies of the invention of the wheel, they're talking about sledges and all sorts of things that are focused on the function of transportation—which is correct. I'm just adding another layer: the foundation of the mechanical principle.”
Once that mechanical principle was firmly embedded in humanity’s collective stash of knowledge, it was a matter of time (a few thousand years) before people looked at animal-drawn sledges, then looked at their pottery wheels and spindles, and put two and two together and got a cart with wheels—or at least, that’s Yashuv’s hypothesis. She and Grosman aren't the first to suggest something similar; early 20th-century archaeologist Gordon V. Childe suggested that most of the major inventions of the Industrial Revolution were just new applications of much older rotary devices.
A village of prehistoric innovators?
Exactly how long people have understood (and made use of) the whole circle-on-a-stick concept is still an open question. Nahal Ein-Gev II is the oldest site with evidence of drop spindles that archaeologists have found so far, but Yashuv says the villagers there probably weren’t the first to invent the concept. They just happened to make their spindle whorls out of rocks with holes drilled in them, leaving a clear trace in the archaeological record.
Modern spindle whorls are often made of wood—either a disc or an X-shaped pair of arms. The trouble with wood, especially in small pieces, is that it’s not very likely to survive thousands of years (although that’s not impossible), so wooden spindle whorls from a site as old as Nahal Ein-Gev II are invisible to archaeologists. In some cultures, spinners might even tie a rock (or even a potato—no joke) to the end of their fibers in lieu of a spindle. Those rocks lack the telltale drill holes that let Yashuv and Grosman recognize the stone spindle whorls at Nahal Ein-Gev II, so they’re also invisible to archaeologists; they just look like rocks. Nahal Ein-Gev II is just the oldest place that recognizable spindle whorls happen to have survived.
Nahal Ein-Gev II is also the only place archaeologists have found so many stone spindle whorls from a period of prehistory before people had invented pottery or farming. Yashuv says that, in a way, that makes sense.
For one thing, people at Nahal Ein-Gev II were already really good at anything to do with drilling holes in small objects. Drills, or perforators, are the most common type of stone tool at the site, and archaeologists have found beautiful beads with neat holes drilled in their centers. And soft, round limestone pebbles litter the nearby shore of the Sea of Galilee even today.
“Maybe they just had this easy raw material just nearby, and it's really easy to drill,” says Yashuv. “We tried it; it's a minute or two [of work], and you're finished.” But after Nahal Ein-Gev II, stone spindle whorls vanish from the archaeological record for another 4,000 years.
“I don't know if they went back to spinning with their body, or just to spinning with another spindle whorl that we don't see,” says Yashuv. When the stone whorls reappear, they're made of the same chalky limestone pebbles at a site 10 kilometers down the coast of the Sea of Galilee—home of the first people to re-invent the wheel.
PLOS ONE, 2017. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0312007 (About DOIs).
