Oldest Known Transportation Technology
More pieces of the puzzle.
Like using the keys below; only I can see who you are.
This is a riff on a post by Matthew Robert Bennett and Sally Christine Reynolds of Bournemouth University on The Conversation.
You’ve probably tried to navigate the supermarket with a cart with at least one child in tow. Wheeled vehicles appeared in around modern Iraq about 5,000 years ago. Recent evidence found—drag marks together with the oldest human footprints found in the Americas—suggests the travois/drag/sledge first appeared about 22,000 years ago in New Mexico.
Footprints found at White Sands National Park have rewritten early American history, pushing back the arrival of the first people to enter the Western Hemisphere by 8,000 years. There is some controversy about the age of these footprints, with some researchers and Native American tribes unhappy with the dating methods, but these prints and tracks provide a picture of life on the margins of a large wetland at the end of the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago.
The footprints in the mud tell us how people lived, hunted, and survived, connecting us to the past in a way that a stone tool can’t.
Traditional archaeology is based on the discovery of stone tools; those made of wood are guesswork. At White Sands, researchers found drag marks while excavating for fossil footprints. Some marks appear as just one trace; others are two parallel traces. Dried mud, buried by sediment and then revealed by erosion and excavation, preserves these marks that extend for dozens of meters before disappearing beneath overlying sediment. They clip barefoot human tracks along their length, suggesting the user dragged the travois (from a French word meaning work, labor, or a frame for restraining horses) over their own footprints as they went along. Most people today have never made a stone tool, but almost all of us will have left a footprint, even if it is only in the sand on the beach.
The footprints and drag marks tell a story of the movement of resources at the edge of this former wetland.
Their inventors probably improvised these travoises as needed to move camp, haul meat from a hunting site, or casualties from a battle. Adults pulled the simple, probably improvised travois, while youngsters tagged along. The analogy of the shopping cart comes into view, as does the pained expression on the adults’ faces as they quest for resources with kids in tow.
Man has always had stuff to move from here to there.
We made no record of it how we did it until we started to write about 5,000 years ago, but we didn’t write about such mundane things until much later. Modern shopping carts rust in ditches and rivers or lie abandoned in the hedges today, but we know that transportation technology must have existed for ancient man, who made their prehistoric equivalents out of wood, and those simply rotted away.
The researchers did tests to “prove” their theory, but any old Boy Scout could have told them what they were seeing.
The construction of travois was in the Boy Scout Handbooks of yore; I studied mine for years, using some of that knowledge in the Army. This Eagle Scout distinctly remembers travois races at camps and camporees. One race in the rain left both footprints and travois tracks in the mud. I built travois in both the Army Active and Reserve components to move equipment from one place to another.
Sometimes academics can’t see the forest for the trees.
The Persistent Past: Discovering The Steele Diaries
The sources we collect to describe the past vary as much as the stories it tells, and our interpretations vary as well. When Curtis Durand, the archivist, finds an old trunk filled with diaries, he not only has to verify their contents, but he has to interpret the stories those diaries tell while he makes sure they’re even what they appear to be.
This is how history books are written.
And Finally...
On 11 July:
1921: William Howard Taft is sworn in as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in Washington, DC. Called a distinguished jurist, effective administrator, but a poor politician by some, Taft was the only person to hold both offices, and one of the few former Presidents to hold any federal office after leaving the White House.
1953: The second battle for Pork Chop Hill, called the Battle of Seokhyeon-dong or Northern Hill by the Chinese, ends in South Korea with the US possessing it, though they had to give it back later. The low-level skirmish for a prominence in what would become the DMZ, which no one really wanted, had started that March, intensified in April, and continued while the peace talks at Panmunjom were ongoing. SLA Marshall, and a 1957 film starring Gregory Peck, depicted this second brawl in a book of that name.
And today is BOWDLER’S DAY, commemorating the birth of Thomas Bowdler in Bath, Somerset, England, on this day in 1754. Bowdler, a physician known for publishing The Family Shakespeare, an edition of William Shakespeare's plays he believed was more appropriate for 19th Century sensibilities. Bowdlerize means editing any form of communication to make the product weaker or less effective.