In the long run the foot is a step in the wrong direction

IT could be argued (indeed, that’s what I’m about to do) that since what would eventually become humankind strode out of what we now call ‘Africa a couple of million years ago, we've been trying to avoid walking any more than is absolutely necessary (which is fair enough, in my book, after schlepping all that way).

- Phil Wisdom

Boats were probably invented all of 50,000 years ago, enabling the first people to reach Australia. Domestication of the horse is currently reckoned to have occurred in central Asia, possibly as long ago as 3,500 BCE - roughly when the wheel was invented, according to the latest estimates - and before long anyone who was anyone had a chariot. Motorised transport took another five and a bit millennia, give or take, but from the mid-19th century mechanised alternatives to perambulation began sprouting like weeds, from steamships to pogo sticks.