A leather shoe, stuffed with grass and fitted to the wearer's right foot, from Armenia.
Credit: PLoS ONE
SYDNEY: The oldest leather shoe yet discovered was kept in pristine condition by a thick layer of sheep dung in a cave in Armenia for 5,500 years, according an international team of archaeologists.
The sheep dung also preserved a variety of other objects, including sheep's horns and fragments of pots containing wheat, barley and apricots.
The shoe predates the leather footwear found on the preserved remains of Ötzi, the Iceman, by at least 200 years, the researchers wrote in an article published in the journal PLoS ONE. The body of Ötzi was found encased in a glacier in the Swiss/Italian alps in 1991 and is dated at 3365-3118 BC.
Oldest leather shoe known
Older footwear in the form of simple moccasins, sandals and slip-on shoes have been dated at up to 7,500 years ago and toe bone studies indicate ancient humans in Europe and the Middle East were wearing footwear around 30,000 years ago.
But this new find is the oldest of its type and the oldest leather shoe known.
The shoe laced up at the back and front but lacked a proper sole, being composed of a single strip of leather wrapped around the foot. It was discovered in 2008 in Armenia's Vayotz Dzor province on the Armenian, Iranian, Nackhichevanian and Turkish borders.
Amazing preservation
The shoe, which was upside down in the dung layer, was stuffed with grass, either in order to keep the shoe's shape, or to keep the wearer's foot warm, the team says.
"I was amazed to find that even the shoe-laces were preserved," says archaeologist Diana Zardaryan, of the Institute of Archaeology, Armenia, who made the find.
The shoe was dated using radiocarbon dating on the grass and the leather at the University of California and University of Oxford.
Shoe looks 600-700 years old
"We thought initially that the shoe and other objects were about 600-700 years old because they were in such good condition," says archaeologist Ron Pinhasi from University College Cork, Ireland, who led the research.
"We do not know yet what the shoe or other objects were doing in the cave or what the purpose of the cave was," he adds.
"We know that there are children's graves at the back of the cave but so little is known about this period that we cannot say with any certainty why all these different objects were found together."
Roughly Australian size seven (US size 7and European size 37), the shoe could have fit an either an adult female or an adult or teenage male, as males were smaller in stature 5,500 years ago, according to the researchers.
Pinhasi notes the shoe is similar in appearance to 'pampooties' worn by Irish in the Aran Islands, west of Ireland, until the 1950s.
"In fact, enormous similarities exist between the manufacturing technique and style of this shoe and those found across Europe at later periods, suggesting that this type of shoe was worn for thousands of years across a large and environmentally diverse region," he says.
Ancient organic material is "exciting find"
Australian archaeologist and anthropologist Ian Gilligan from the Australian National University in Canberra, who has recently completed his doctorate on the evolution of clothing, says the find is "certainly remarkable".
"Clothing goes back to textiles discovered in dry regions such as Israel about 9,500 years ago, but to find any organic material thousands of years old is certainly exciting," he says.
"The sheer perfection of preservation is remarkable and I don't think there is anything comparable to it."
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