[Mr Rogers]

If you need to move 200 lbs, something with wheels - including friction - is possible. On one's back? Not likely, particularly if the object is irregular and hard. A large dog can pull a cart.

I suspect a better explanation is we sit on the shoulders of giants and think we owe our view entirely to ourselves. We've had wheels for moving loads for so many thousands of years we cannot conceive of anyone NOT making the connection...but in the New World, it seems no one did.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

We had wheels for thousands of years but it was not until the middle ages that the wheelbarrow was invented. At least in Europe. In China they had it for a long time before but still long after the arrival of the wheeled cart pulled by draft animals.

Like the concept of zero, double ledger book keeping, the horse collar or using water wheels for something besides grinding grain there are any number of things that are blindingly obvious in retrospect.

[ADemocratNoMore]

The image looks like something from Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii or something taken in Russia before the revolution. May I ask it’s history ?