Researchers model how the first use of the wheel may have developed

A pair of engineers and a historian have teamed up together to model the means by which the first use of the wheel may have happened. In their paper published in Royal Society Open Science, Lee Alacoque, from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Kai James, with the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Richard Bulliet, from Columbia University, all in the U.S., describe the process that may have unfolded as workers at a copper mine in the Carpathian Mountains sought to move ore more easily from deep within a mine approximately 6,000 years ago.