Archaeologists say 12,000-year-old Middle East stones may be earliest known wheel technology

Dig in northern Israel finds first example of ancient spindle whorls, disc-shaped objects used to spin cloth

A perforated stone from Nahal-Ein Gev II dig site in front of its 3D model. Photo: Daniel Rolider for the Smithsonian Magazine

Archaeologists have found a collection of 12,000-year-old stones in the Middle East which may be the earliest known example of the wheel in action. The perforated pebbles from an archaeological dig in northern Israel are likely to be spindle whorls, disc-shaped objects with a hollowed centre used in an ancient method of spinning cloth.

These stones are believed to be from settlements of the Natufians, an ancient culture situated in modern-day Israel, Palestine and Jordan. This era marked the transition to an agricultural lifestyle before the Neolithic period, long before the cart wheels of the Bronze Age, which came thousands of years later.

Spindle whorls are an example of "wheel and axle" technology that allows the spinning of raw fibre into twisted thread. They showed humanity the importance of rotation before they grasped how wheels could be used to move items or create pottery.

The discovery pushes back the known timeline for wheel-like inventions by about 4,000 years, researchers say. The advent of the wheel is thought to have occurred in Mesopotamia or perhaps eastern Europe, but its exact birthplace is unknown.

"The stones mentioned in the research represent a milestone in our understanding of the development of wheeled rotational technologies", Talia Yashuv, professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told The National. She said that while wheel-less rotational technologies have been in use for thousands of years – for example in drilling to make holes and fire and in manual fibre spinning – the recently stone tools are actually the first wheels in "form and function".

The stones were recovered from the Nahal-Ein Gev II dig site in northern Israel and date back approximately 12,000 years. Using 3D modelling, researchers analysed over a hundred of these stones, which are mostly made from limestone, with hollowed or partially hollowed centres.

Due to their structure and composition, the authors of the paper strongly believe they were used spindle whorls, a hypothesis also supported by successfully spinning flax using replicas of the stones. This collection of ancient spindle whorls would represent a very early example of humans using rotation with a wheel-shaped tool, Prof Yashuv said, adding that they might have paved the way for later rotational technologies, which were vital to the development of early human civilisations.

"However, at this early time, the innovation of wheeled rotational technologies is still non-linear, and for some reason, there’s a gap of 4,000 years until the ‘pottery Neolithic’ period, in which centrally perforated tools made of stones or ceramics, mostly reported as spindle whorls, are recovered in a wide geographical distribution, through all periods up to historical times."

"From this moment, additional wheeled rotational technologies start to evolve – the potter’s wheel and the cart wheel, and the rest is history." The research is the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Talia Yashuv and Leore Grosman from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.