Soon afterwards the American archaeologist made a second unsettling discovery at Tres Zapotes: children’s toys in the form of little wheeled dogs.9 These cute artefacts conflicted head-on with prevailing archaeological opinion, which held that the wheel had remained undiscovered in Central America until the time of the conquest. The ‘dogmobiles’ proved, at the very least, that the principle of the wheel had been known to the Olmecs, Central America’s earliest civilization. And if a people as resourceful as the Olmecs had worked out the principle of the wheel, it seemed highly unlikely that
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