A picture of Neolithic life
Between 1974 and 1976, archaeologists excavating a large Neolithic settlement near the Nidzica River in southern Poland uncovered a remarkable ceramic vase. The settlement, located in the village of Bronocice, belonged to the Funnelbeaker culture, which flourished in Central and Northern Europe from approximately 4300 to 2800 BC. Animal bones found in the same pit as the pot fragments allowed for radiocarbon dating of the site. The results place the pot's creation between 3635 and 3370 BC.
The pot itself is an unassuming clay vessel, but its surface is incised with a series of symbolic images that show the world of its creators. The most significant of these is a set of five rudimentary drawings showing a four-wheeled vehicle. These images are the oldest well-dated depictions of wheeled wagons found anywhere in the world. The drawings clearly show a vehicle with a central shaft for a draft animal and four wheels connected by axles. This find is contemporaneous with the earliest pictographs of wheeled vehicles from Uruk in Mesopotamia, dated to around 3500–3350 BC, challenging the long-held theory that the wheel originated solely in the Near East.