Every Prehistoric Invention Explained: Why the Wheel Came Last

Imagine being dropped 3.3 million years into the past with no phone, no fire and no trousers. All you've got is a rock, and it isn't even sharp yet. Here are 12 prehistoric inventions in the order they turned up, ending with the one every cartoon caveman already owns. It arrives embarrassingly late.

Stone tools: older than humans

Before stone tools, your teeth are your knife, your hammer and your nutcracker. You'd assume the first toolmaker was human. It wasn't. The oldest stone tools ever found, at Lomekwi in Kenya, are 3.3 million years old, which is half a million years older than the first humans. Archaeologists only found them because they took a wrong turn.

The likely makers were Lucy's family, with brains not much bigger than a chimp's. The biggest tool weighs 15 kilos, so think less Swiss Army knife and more Swiss Army boulder. The first inventor in history wasn't even one of us.

Fire, and the invention of the afternoon off

Controlled fire turns up about a million years ago. The oldest proof is ash and burnt bone in Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa. If you squeezed the whole history of tools into one day, fire would arrive at 4:44 p.m. Long morning.

Using fire isn't the same as making it, though. The oldest proof of anyone starting a fire is only 400,000 years old. Before that, if your fire went out, it was gone. Hope you like babysitting a flame all night.

The oldest cooked meal on record is fish, from 780,000 years ago. Without cooking, chewing eats about half your day. A primate your size should spend 48% of its day eating, and you spend 4.7%. Fire gave us dinner, and then it gave us the afternoon off.

Spears: harder than a pointy stick

Spears arrive about 500,000 years ago. Before that, hunting meant throwing rocks and hoping, or waiting politely for a lion to finish.

A spear sounds easy. It isn't. The oldest stone-tipped spears, from South Africa, needed a carefully shaped stone point fixed onto a shaft, with no tape and no tutorial. The oldest complete spears, from Germany, are 2-metre wooden javelins found among butchered horses. Just you, a stick and a horse that isn't in the mood.

One more dent in human pride: chimps in Senegal make spears today.

Clothes, as recorded by lice

Humans lost their body hair about a million years ago and got dressed much later. That's hundreds of thousands of years of nudist camp.

Furs rot, so there's nothing left to dig up. Scientists asked the lice instead. Body lice only live in clothes, so when they split off from head lice, clothes must have existed. Their DNA puts that at least 83,000 years ago, and maybe 170,000. Precise-ish. The oldest record of human fashion was kept by lice.

Jewellery and art: bling before pictures

You'd think decoration came last. In fact jewellery goes back at least 142,000 years. Shell beads from Morocco beat the oldest known cave art by 74,000 years. We accessorised long before we decorated.

The oldest drawing is 73,000 years old, done in red crayon, and it looks like a hashtag. The oldest rock art is a hand stencil with the fingertips made pointy. The first selfie already had a filter.

The bow and arrow, with added poison

About 64,000 years ago, hunters could finally get dinner without getting close enough for dinner to smell them. The oldest arrowheads, from South Africa, still carry impact damage, blood and glue. On the one-day clock that's 11:32 p.m., and we're only halfway down the list.

Arrowheads around 60,000 years old from another site carry poison mixed into the glue, probably from a plant literally called the poison bulb. The same poison was on arrows collected in the 1770s. Humanity's first chemistry homework was weapons, obviously.

The sewing needle, possibly for beads

The eyed needle shows up about 40,000 years ago. You'd assume it was about staying warm, and the oldest ones do come from icy Siberia. But fitted clothes were already possible with pointy bone awls, simple tools for punching holes. One team thinks the eye was for fine sewing, to decorate. So picture freezing cold, mammoths outside, and someone in mittens sewing on beads. The first fashion week was in Siberia.

Dogs: the first one we know of was a spoiled pet

Dogs arrive about 23,000 years ago. Genetics puts them in Siberia by then, more than 12,000 years before sheep and goats.

You'd expect the first dogs to be workers. The oldest known grave of people and dogs, in Germany, holds a sick puppy. It had distemper, which kills in under three weeks without care. This one lived about eight more weeks. Someone kept it warm, clean and fed, even though it could never work.

Dogs even evolved a muscle for puppy eyes, which wolves barely have. So who tamed whom?

Pottery came before farming

Pots appear about 20,000 years ago. You'd think they came with farming, to store all that grain. But the oldest pots, from Xianrendong Cave in China, were made by Ice Age hunter-gatherers at least 10,000 years before farming showed up there. Soot marks say they were for cooking. The menu was probably clams and snails, and the snails were not consulted.

A fired clay statue from the Czech Republic is older still. Humans made a ceramic sculpture before they made a bowl.

Bread came before farming too

Bread goes back 14,400 years, and you'd assume it needed wheat fields first. The oldest bread ever found, at Shubayqa in Jordan, is at least 4,000 years older than farming. Hunter-gatherers ground, sieved and kneaded wild grain, the most labour-intensive snack in history. It only survived because it got burnt, so the first bread was also the first burnt toast.

One archaeologist thinks craving more of it helped push people into farming. Bread didn't come from farming. Farming may have come from bread.

Farming and beer: a big decision, maybe made for a drink

Farming starts about 11,000 years ago, when the Fertile Crescent tamed its first eight crops, including wheat, barley and lentils. But skeletons show early farmers were often shorter, with more cavities and more disease. Jared Diamond called farming "the worst mistake in the history of the human race". Harsh review. Our tour of how long you'd survive in history scores the first farmers below the Stone Age, too.

So why farm at all? In 1953 scientists held a real meeting called "Did man once live by beer alone?" A cave in Israel hints at beer 13,000 years ago, before farming, though it was closer to a porridge you chew. The oldest proven alcohol, from China, is 9,000 years old and made of rice, honey and fruit. The first cocktail. Humanity's biggest decision may have been made for a drink.

The wheel came dead last

Every cartoon caveman has stone wheels. The real wheel came about 5,500 years ago, 3.3 million years after the first stone tool. On the one-day clock it rolls in at 11:57 p.m., less than three minutes to midnight. No Stone Age hunter-gatherer ever saw a wheel.

Why so late? The wheel is the easy bit. The axle is the nightmare. It has to be almost perfectly round and smooth, snug but free to spin. Get it wrong and you've invented a very heavy chair. Carving one took copper chisels, which only became common after 4,000 BC. So the wheel needed metal, metal needed fire, and fire needed someone awake all night.

Even then, the first wheels in the Middle East spun pots, not people. The oldest surviving wheel, from Slovenia, is wood, not stone. Sorry, Fred. Within a few centuries writing turns up and prehistory is over, so the wheel only just squeezed in. Next time someone tells you not to reinvent the wheel, remember it took 3 million years to invent it once.

The short version

• The first stone tools, 3.3 million years old, predate humans.
• Cooking cut eating time to 4.7% of the day, against 48% for a primate our size.
• Jewellery came before cave art, and pottery and bread both came before farming.
• Early farmers were often shorter and sicker, and beer may be part of why they farmed anyway.
• The wheel came last, about 5,500 years ago, because the axle needed copper tools.