Humans were using wooden sledges more than 20,000 years ago, experts have found - the earliest form of transport ever discovered.
Archaeologists have uncovered what could be trace marks left by the oldest known hand-drawn carts, predating the invention of the wheel by thousands of years. A series of fossilised drag-marks, likely to have been made by makeshift carts with wooden poles, were found alongside ancient human footprints at White Sands national park in New Mexico in the US.
Similar sledges, called “travois” are known to have been used by indigenous people of North America, but it is the first time they have been found so far back in the archaeological record, reports The Telegraph. Prof Matthew Bennett of Bournemouth University, who led the study, said: “We know that our earliest ancestors must have used some form of transport to carry their possessions as they migrated around the world, but evidence in the form of wooden vehicles has rotted away."
“These drag marks give us the first indication of how they moved heavy and bulky loads around before wheeled vehicles existed.”
Some of these marks preserved in dried mud occur as two parallel, equidistant traces extending for dozens of metres with barefoot human tracks along their length. The findings have been published in the journal Quaternary Science Advances.
Until now, the earliest evidence of transport comes from cave art, with pictures of boars dating to about 10,000 years ago as well as changes to animal hooves and paws around the same period which suggests they were pulling heavy loads.
But the new finds push the date of transport back by more than 10,000 years.