--- title: Everyday inventions: pots, boats, wheels, horses, clocks and glasses — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Everyday inventions: pots, boats, wheels, horses, clocks and glasses», a lesson of the history course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Lucía's friend goes further: «The Aztecs didn't even have the wheel, they weren't that smart.» --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/62-everyday-inventions-pots-boats-wheels-horses-clocks-and-glasses/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [History](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/) / Everyday inventions: pots, boats, whee… # Everyday inventions: pots, boats, wheels, horses, clocks and glasses Lesson 62 of the history course of Mova's primary school: 22 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/history/62-everyday-inventions-pots-boats-wheels-horses-clocks-and-glasses/). - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/62-everyday-inventions-pots-boats-wheels-horses-clocks-and-glasses/1/) — Lucía's friend goes further: «The Aztecs didn't even have the wheel, they weren't that smart.» - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/62-everyday-inventions-pots-boats-wheels-horses-clocks-and-glasses/2/) — What really happened: wheeled carts appeared only about 5,500 years ago, long after fire, boats, pots and farming. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/62-everyday-inventions-pots-boats-wheels-horses-clocks-and-glasses/3/) — The Aztecs made little wheeled toy animals, so they knew the idea, but with no horses or oxen to pull carts and a city built on a lake, canoes worked better. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/62-everyday-inventions-pots-boats-wheels-horses-clocks-and-glasses/4/) — Think of your bike in a muddy forest: sometimes walking is smarter. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/62-everyday-inventions-pots-boats-wheels-horses-clocks-and-glasses/5/) — Hassan's Moroccan gran laughs at his toy truck because in North Africa people once swapped carts for camels, which needed no roads and could cross sand. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/62-everyday-inventions-pots-boats-wheels-horses-clocks-and-glasses/6/) — Boats are far older than wheels. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/62-everyday-inventions-pots-boats-wheels-horses-clocks-and-glasses/7/) — People reached Australia at least 50,000 years ago across open sea. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/62-everyday-inventions-pots-boats-wheels-horses-clocks-and-glasses/8/) — Tama from New Zealand says his koro, Māori for grandfather, told him their tīpuna, the ancestors, sailed there by the stars: «chur», a Kiwi way to say cheers. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/62-everyday-inventions-pots-boats-wheels-horses-clocks-and-glasses/9/) — Small things changed daily life too: clay pots for soup, horses for speed, clocks for trains, glasses for old eyes and bicycles that Amara's mum calls «proper rad», meaning really cool, because they gave women freedom to travel on their own. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/62-everyday-inventions-pots-boats-wheels-horses-clocks-and-glasses/10/) — Wheeled carts appeared about 5,500 years ago, in the Middle East and on the steppes of Eastern Europe, long after farming and pottery. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/62-everyday-inventions-pots-boats-wheels-horses-clocks-and-glasses/11/) — People in Mexico made wheeled toy animals, but with no big animals to pull carts and steep land and lakes, they used canoes, carriers and roads instead. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/62-everyday-inventions-pots-boats-wheels-horses-clocks-and-glasses/12/) — About 1,500 years ago, many people in the Middle East and North Africa stopped using carts and moved goods by camel, because camels were cheaper and needed no roads. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/62-everyday-inventions-pots-boats-wheels-horses-clocks-and-glasses/13/) — The oldest known pottery, found in China, is about 20,000 years old and was made by hunter-gatherers, before farming. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/62-everyday-inventions-pots-boats-wheels-horses-clocks-and-glasses/15/) — Polynesian navigators sailed double canoes across the Pacific, reading stars, waves, winds and birds, and reached Aotearoa New Zealand about 700 to 800 years ago. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/62-everyday-inventions-pots-boats-wheels-horses-clocks-and-glasses/16/) — About 2,500 years ago the Persian Royal Road had rest stations where fresh riders and horses carried messages in relays; the Inca later built about 40,000 km of roads with runners. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/62-everyday-inventions-pots-boats-wheels-horses-clocks-and-glasses/17/) — Scientists using ancient DNA think the horses we ride today were tamed on the steppes north of the Black Sea, around what is now southern Russia and Ukraine, about 4,200 years ago; this is still studied. - [18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/62-everyday-inventions-pots-boats-wheels-horses-clocks-and-glasses/18/) — The Greek writer Herodotus praised the Persian messengers, saying that neither snow nor rain nor heat nor night stopped them; his words are carved on the main post office in New York. - [19](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/62-everyday-inventions-pots-boats-wheels-horses-clocks-and-glasses/19/) — Until trains in the 1800s, nothing on land went faster than a horse. - [20](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/62-everyday-inventions-pots-boats-wheels-horses-clocks-and-glasses/20/) — Mechanical clocks spread in Europe from about 1300, and China built a great water-driven clock tower in the 1090s. - [21](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/62-everyday-inventions-pots-boats-wheels-horses-clocks-and-glasses/21/) — Each town once set its clocks by the Sun; railways made Britain use one time in the 1840s, and the world agreed time zones from the 1880s. - [22](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/62-everyday-inventions-pots-boats-wheels-horses-clocks-and-glasses/22/) — Eyeglasses were invented in Italy around 1280 to 1290, so people over 40 could keep reading and sewing. - [23](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/62-everyday-inventions-pots-boats-wheels-horses-clocks-and-glasses/23/) — The safety bicycle with two equal wheels and a chain came in the 1880s and let many women travel alone for the first time. - ← previous: [How we got here: the big steps on one long timeline](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/61-how-we-got-here-the-big-steps-on-one-long-timeline/) - next →: [Writing, laws and money: how strangers learned to trust each other](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/63-writing-laws-and-money-how-strangers-learned-to-trust-each-other/) - ↑ back to [History](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/)