The go-to place to look for inventions is usually China. The Mo was developed around 250BC.
That's pretty recent.
However, it looks like Greeks in about 400's BC invented a hopper mill (grain fed through a hole in the top stone), and somebody in Spain probably invented a rotary mill about the same time. The diffusion must have gone the other way this time.
This source suggests that the requirements of olive processing demanded innovations in milling that some clever folks transferred to grinding grain.
The rotary quern and rotary mill aren't very suitable for processing the typical crops of African rainforests, so is isn't surprising not to find them there. And since they were invented so recently they'd have to have been re-invented in the Americas--but they weren't. The labor needed to make one wouldn't seem likely to pay off quickly unless more than just a couple of families were grinding their grain with it. Several AmerIndian cultures had densely populated farming sites, so they could certainly have used it if they had it.
As a side note, I was curious about where North American Indians got their beans: ""These four cultivated species have similar origins in the Americas, tepary found in NW Mexico and southern Arizona, scarlet runner and year-beans found in Southern Mexico and the highlands of Guatemala and the lima bean mirrors the common bean in that it has two centers of origin: one in Andean region and the other in Middle America." I knew about the Andes and Central America, but not New Mexico. Obviously the seeds went all over the place--I have no idea how quickly, though. I wonder if anybody has been able to trace that spread.
2 comments:
No wheels for our native Americans.
Yep. It looks like almost none at all, though apparently some pots look as though somebody slowly rotated the platform--but not many. And I've no idea how they tell "slowly rotated" from rapidly rotated--pottery is not something I've worked with. I'd think that turned a platform by hand would make enough of a difference for small pots that potters would take up the practice, but without something more mechanical, large pots would be impossible.
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