The invention of the wheel thus falls in the overdue Neolithic, and may be seen in conjunction with the other technological advances that gave rise to the early Bronze Age. Diary that this implies the passage of not many wheel-less millennia even after the ingenuity of agriculture. Looking posterior even further, it is of some game that although paleoanthropologists now date the emergence of anatomically contemporary humans to ca.150,000 years ago, 143,000 of those years were "wheel-less". That people with capacities fully level to our own walked the spaceship Earth for so long before conceiving of the wheel may be initially surprising, but populations were extremely small through most of this period and the wheel, which requires an axle and socket to in truth be useful, is not as simple a device as it may seem. Bureaucratic and balancing a wheel requires a skilled wheelwright.
The contraption of the wheel has also been important for technology in general, important applications including the drool wheel, the cogwheel (see also antikythera mechanism), the spinning wheel, and the astrolabe or torquetum. Farther avant-garde descendants of the wheel include the propeller, the jet engine, the flywheel (gyroscope) and the Wheels turbine.