The Ljubljana Marshes Wheel is a wooden wheel that was found in the Ljubljana Marshes some 20 kilometres south of Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, in 2002. Radiocarbon dating, performed in the VERA laboratory (Vienna Environmental Research Accelerator) in Vienna, showed that it is approximately 5,150 years old, which makes it the oldest wooden wheel and the oldest real wheel-axle combination yet discovered. It was discovered by a team of Slovene archeologists from the Ljubljana Institute of Archaeology, a part of the Research Center at the Slovene Academy of Arts and Sciences, under the guidance of Anton Velušček.

The invention of the wheel falls into the late Neolithic, and may be seen in conjunction with other technological advances that gave rise to the early Bronze Age.

The Halaf culture of 6500–5100 BCE is sometimes credited with the earliest depiction of a wheeled vehicle, but this is doubtful as there is no evidence of Halafians using either wheeled vehicles or even pottery wheels.

Precursors of wheels, known as "tournettes" or "slow wheels", were known in the Middle East by the 5th millennium BCE (one of the earliest examples was discovered at Tepe Pardis, Iran, and dated to 5200–4700 BCE). These were made of stone or clay and secured to the ground with a peg in the center, but required significant effort to turn. True (freely-spinning) potter's wheels were apparently in use in Mesopotamia by 3500 BCE and possibly as early as 4000 BCE and the oldest surviving example, which was found in Ur (modern day Iraq), dates to approximately 3100 BCE

The first evidence of wheeled vehicles appears in the second half of the 4th millennium BCE, near-simultaneously in Mesopotamia (Sumerian civilization), the Northern Caucasus (Maykop culture) and Eastern Europe (Cucuteni-Trypillian culture), so the question of which culture originally invented the wheeled vehicle is still unsolved.

The earliest well-dated depiction of a wheeled vehicle (wagon — four wheels, two axles) is on the Bronocice pot, a c. 3500 – 3350 BCE clay pot excavated in a Funnelbeaker culture settlement in southern Poland.

The oldest securely dated real wheel-axle combination, that from Stare Gmajne near Ljubljana in Slovenia (Ljubljana Marshes Wooden Wheel) is now dated within two standard deviations to 3340–3030 BCE, the axle to 3360–3045 BCE.

Two types of early Neolithic European wheel and axle are known (Prehistoric pile dwellings around the Alps); a circumalpine type of wagon construction (the wheel and axle rotate together, as in Ljubljana Marshes Wheel), and that of the Baden culture in Hungary (axle does not rotate). They both are dated to c. 3200–3000 BCE.

In China, the wheel was certainly present with the adoption of the chariot in c. 1200 BCE, although Barbieri-Low argues for earlier Chinese wheeled vehicles, c. 2000 BC.