Found shoe is 5,600 years old
Dig in Armenian cave yielded heads, winemaking items
LOS ANGELES – Archaeologists from the University of California, Los Angeles, and Ireland have discovered the world’s oldest leather shoe, an exquisitely preserved, 5,600-year-old woman’s size 7 lace-up, in a cave in Armenia.
The shoe, 1,000 years older than the great pyramid of Egypt and 400 years older than Stonehenge in the United Kingdom, was in such pristine condition that at first researchers thought it was just a few centuries old. It was stuffed with grass that may have been used to keep the wearer’s foot warm or that might have been to preserve the shoe’s shape for storage, the researchers reported Wednesday in the online journal PLoS One.
Both grass and shoe were well preserved, like other organic materials discovered in preliminary excavations of the cave on the border between Armenia and Iran, including winemaking apparatus complete with grapes and three human heads preserved in jars.
The artifacts date from the Chalcolithic or Copper Age, when the first metal tools began appearing.
“The fourth millennium is when the modern world appears – the first cities, the first kings, the first axes, the first bureaucrats, and the first international trading system,” said archaeologist Mitchell S. Rothman of Widener University in Chester, Penn., who was not involved in the research.
The site “connects us up to this growing picture of the development of societies,” he said.
Radiocarbon dating indicated that the newly-found shoe was from about 3,600 B.C.
Its relatively sophisticated design, however, suggests that the style had already been in use for a long period, said UCLA archaeologist Gregory Areshian, the co-leader of the research team.
Previously, he added, researchers had tried to reconstruct what shoes had looked like from impressions on pottery and other fragmentary artifacts. “Here we have it in an absolutely tangible way.”
The shoe is shaped to fit the wearer’s right foot. It is 9.65 inches long, which corresponds to a U.S. woman’s size 7. Though small, it could easily have fitted a man from that era, said archaeologist Ron Pinhasi of University College Cork in Ireland, Areshian’s co-leader.