In the chapter on the wheel it will be shown that 
transport without wheels had played a big role before the 
wheel, some of which was by sledge, over both snow and bogs. 
Much of it was by pack animal—woman being the first pack 
animal. Most wheel-less transport in the past, however, was by 
river and by sea, a fact that is today as richly expressed as ever 
in the location and form of the great cities of the world. Some 
writers have observed that man’s oldest beast of burden was 
woman, because the male had to be free to run interference for 
the woman, as ball-carrier, as it were. But that phase belonged 
to the pre-wheel stage of transport, when there was only the 
tractless waste of man the hunter and food-gatherer. Today, 
when the greatest volume of transport consists in the moving 
of information, the wheel and the road are undergoing 
recession and obsolescence; but in the first instance, given the 
pressure for, and from, wheels, there had to be roads to