12,000-Year-Old Spindles Hint at Humanity’s First Steps Toward the Wheel

The wheel was such an important innovation for humankind that “reinventing the wheel” is still shorthand for starting something from scratch. But sometimes, that rhetorical device is more literal than tongue-in-cheek. This week, a team of researchers described early evidence for “rotational technologies” near the Sea of Galilee.

The team published its study this week in PLOS One, describing 113 perforated stones found in Nahal Ein Gev II (or NEG II), a Natufian village in northern Israel. The team posits that the stones are 12,000-year-old spindle whorls, used to spin fibers into yarn. If they’re correct, it’s a very early example of humankind toying with the technology that would revolutionize human transportation and cultural exchange.

Six of the studied stones were discovered in a test excavation in 1972; the remaining 107 were excavated between 2010 and 2021. According to the paper, 42% of the assemblage was completely perforated, 32% had partial holes, and 36% were unfinished, with one or two drill marks showing that a perforation was underway.

The earliest archaeological evidence for an actual wheel dates back to about 5,000 years ago, a wheel found in Slovenia’s Ljubljana Marshes in 2002. But the Natufian culture that produced the recently described spindle whorls existed across the Levant between about 15,000 years ago and 11,500 years ago. Though a direct line can’t be drawn between the ancient spindles and the wheel, the fundamental technology at work is the same.

“In the current study, we have shown how the perforated pebbles from NEG II provide evidence of a 12,000 years old wheeled-shaped tool harnessed in a rotational mechanism,” the researchers wrote. “We suggest, therefore, that spindle whorls, including those from NEG II, relate to the evolution of the ensuing rotational technologies by laying the mechanical principle of the wheel and axle.”

A wheel is only as good as its axle, of course. If you’ve got a wheel but no axle, you’re going nowhere fast. The perforated pebbles studied by the team would only function as a spindle whorl if a stick were passed through them, and then spun to produce yarn and thread.

The team considered other uses for the pebbles; they noted beads, fishing weights, and loom weights as other possible applications. But the researchers also conducted a feasibility test of their spindle whorl hypothesis, and found that it checked out.

“The experiment demonstrated that not only do the replicas function well as spindle whorls but that the parameters we suspected as disadvantageous were actually beneficial for this purpose,” the team wrote, noting that heavier and lighter whorls had different benefits for spinning the fibers.

“Most importantly, we found out that perfectly round artifacts are not a prerequisite,” the authors added. “The fact that the hole and the centre of mass are located at the item’s centre was enough for the task. The Natufian inhabitants of NEG II could have modified standard round artifacts, as exemplified by several perfectly rounded stones and the bead industry recovered on site, yet they chose not to.”

In other words, the Natufians on the site seemed to produce the perforated pebbles on the site, and did not need the stones to be a perfect shape for them to be deployed as spindle whorls.

The pebbles were certainly too small to be wheels, unless the ancient people were making model carts. But even as spindle whorls, the pebbles shows how early humans were testing the utility of the torus-shaped technology.

The spindle whorls predate the earliest known wheels by thousands of years. We’ll likely never track down the first-ever wheel, but tracing the history of the technological innovation helps anthropologists bridge a significant gap in our understanding.