Humans Have Had Vehicles Longer Than We've Had Agriculture: Study
Amber DaSilva
Tue, November 3, 2026 at 1:35 PM UTC
(Richard Throssel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Human development has had its share of historical milestones:
- Written language
- Domestication of animals
- Development of the HitClips®™ music player
All of these were critical to our development as a species, all are fundamentally part of what makes us human today, but all pale in comparison to another milestone: Development of vehicles, which new evidence suggests predates all that other stuff. Take that, agriculture, vehicles came first.
A study out of Quaternary Science Advances, spotted by Futurism, examined tracks preserved in the mud of a long-dried New Mexico lakebed. The tracks, researchers determined, were from humans dragging a type of sled called a travois behind them as they walked. The existence of the travois is nothing new, but these tracks are the oldest evidence of such a vehicle—they date back 22,000 years.