American Cars of 1958

[Monksdream]

November 16--Homo tinkerus (Part 1)

Credit -- or perhaps blame -- should go to William Hanna and Joseph Barbera for distorting America’s perception of Stone Age man. Some of us are stuck with this archetypal image. Many Americans still think of Fred Flintstone when they should be thinking about how the wheel came to be in the first place. The truth is a caveman didn’t invent the wheel. Archeologists who literally dig into Earth’s crust in search of mankind’s past doings can’t find anything resembling a wheel in the period when hominids — the first cavemen -- evolved into homo sapiens about a million years ago.

The archeological record of early man makes it difficult for scientists to determine what our earliest ancestors were up to in their everyday lives The evidence is so scant all the bones scientists have found wouldn’t fill the bed of a pickup truck. Such limited evidence leads to a great deal of conjecture and outright guesswork. At best, what they have determined -- who would have thought otherwise -- is they lived in dangerous circumstances. Many of the animals they hunted for protein also wanted to eat them. Lifespans were short compared to the average longevity of modern humans enjoying the comforts of civilization -- 30 years versus 70 years now.
Based on what the diggers of the past do believe is early man faced such a perilous existence that thinking about anything other than daily survival was way down the list of priorities. Some take the view that man’s earliest ancestors weren’t capable of abstract thought. Invention simply had to wait until the brain inside that thin shell reached a point where it figure out easier ways to get by.
It seems that after a million years of struggle, humans only figured out how to grow their own food around 10,000 BCE. There is even recent evidence that suggests people were using agriculture as long ago as 23,000 years. Even then, there is no available evidence that suggests someone invented the wheel.
As was previously mentioned, early humans weren’t equipped for abstract thought. Certainly there were things around them that were round in shape, like tree trunks, plus flowers and other plants with morphologies that could be spun or whirled in one’s hand. So maybe some early cave guy decided to place a wooly mammoth he’s just killed on some logs he found lying around and tried to roll it back to camp. That sounds easy enough, but if you take the time to picture it, it’s actually difficult and involves a whole lot of physical effort.
It’s fairly easy, though, to envision some caveman in his leisure time — when he had leisure time — to pick up a small stone, rough it up against a harder stone, and fashion an object shaped like a disc. But what would it be used for? Probably as a weapon our early ancestors would use in hunting.
We have this idea that the earliest form of the wheel was a stone disc with a hole in the center. That’s easy enough to envision. But you needed tools to properly shape it. You needed abstract thought to place the hole in the exact center so the stone disc would roll true on its axle.
And axle? What’s an axle? A kind of caveman ax? We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Face it, a stone disc by itself, even though it’s round and can roll, is still heavy. And you can’t control it. So the wheel as we understand it and how it’s used had to wait a few more hundreds of thousands of years. Life was tough on humans for a long, long time.
It wasn’t until humans had developed agriculture and settled down into one place and organized themselves into villages that grew into towns that eventually grew into cities that the wheel had uses. The first use was to turn it on its side, attach an axle to it so it would spin to make pottery. There’s that word “axle” again.


The first potter’s wheels appeared in Mesopotamia around 6,500 BCE. Making pots easily became a snap. The wheels were made of wood. For that task, our ancient ancestors, who we like to think were the earliest examples of civilized man, needed tools. That era was also known as the Bronze Age. We had the necessary metal tools to cut, chip, chisel and shape wood and stone into wheels. So along the way homo tinkerus had to invent that stuff, too.
But notice that rod connecting the lower and upper wheels in the image. It’s called an axle. It’s not that hard to imagine -- let’s say someone imagineered it -- some clever precursor to our modern nerds and geeks decided to turn the two wheels on their sides. Now we have a car-t, as the following image of an ancient Greek wagon easily demonstrates.


But look a bit closer at the image. The spokes certainly made wheels lighter and much easier for a human or animal to pull. But there is something else on the wheel that actually makes all the difference between mankind spending all his time making pots for the next 10,000 years and doing something about advancing the cause of civilization. And it’s not the steering assembly connected to the front wheels.
How about we take a closer look at the wheel as it has been for thousands of years right up to the present.

Chariots and Chicks
Around the turn of the 20th Century, architect Louis Sullivan, who designed the first American skyscrapers, is still revered for making this famous design maxim: Form Follows Function. In other words, sure it’s easy on the eye but it’s still got to work. When a designer or builder or manufacturer can make the two concepts work in harmony you have a thing of beauty.


The Three Fs in this Etruscan war chariot, built sometime in the 6th Century BCE is the very essence of what someone with an idea for shapes, lines, proportion and the ability to make it all work together in a piece of functionary machinery was all about. Sullivan’s maxim made as sense 5,000 years ago as it does today.
The chariot is made of bronze. It was the Bronze Age when homo tinkerus first learned how to work metal with a high degree of sophistication. Imagine a well-muscled horse harnessed to this two-wheeled cart with a platform on which armor plating is attached. The plating itself has a relief of an ancient warrior, sword in hand, poised to lay waste to an enemy combatant.
While you’re at, think Muscle Car, for that is what war chariots were in the ancient world. Since there’s no covering, you might as well think of this gorgeous artifact as a convertible model. Maybe the driver, a dashing young officer in the chariot regiment, took it to the main drag of town on Saturday night to bird dog chicks.