Home On Wheels

Evidence of wheeled vehicles appears from the mid 4th millennium BCE, near-simultaneously in Mesopotamia, the Northern Caucasus (Maykop culture) and Central Europe, so that the question of which culture originally invented the wheeled vehicle remains unresolved and under debate.
The earliest well-dated depiction of a wheeled vehicle (a wagon—four wheels, two axles), is on the Bronocice pot, a ca. 3500–3350 BCE clay pot excavated in a Funnelbeaker culture settlement in southern Poland.
The wheeled vehicle spread from the area of its first occurrence (Mesopotamia, Caucasus, Balkans, Central Europe) across Eurasia, reaching the Indus Valley by the 3rd millennium BCE. During the 2nd millennium BCE, the spoke-wheeled chariot spread at an increased pace, reaching both China and Scandinavia by 1200 BCE. In China, the wheel was certainly present with the adoption of the chariot in ca. 1200 BCE, although Barbieri-Low argues for earlier Chinese wheeled vehicles, circa 2000 BCE.
Although they did not develop the wheel proper, the Olmec and certain other western hemisphere cultures seem to have approached it, as wheel-like worked stones have been found on objects identified as children's toys dating to about 1500 BCE. Early antiquity Nubians used wheels for spinning pottery and waterwheels. It is thought that Nubian waterwheels may have been ox-driven It is also known that Nubians used horse-driven chariots imported from Egypt.