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PASSAGE 1

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The Oldest Leather Shoe

Archeologists discovered in 2010 what is said to be the world's oldest known leather shoe. The 5,500-year-old shoe, some 1,000 years older than the Egyptian pyramids, was found by scientists excavating a huge cave, designated Areni-1, in Armenia near the border of Turkey and Iran. The shoe was part of a treasure trove of artefacts that experts say provide unprecedented information about an important and sparsely documented era: the Chalcolithic period or Copper Age, when humans are believed to have invented the wheel, as well as domesticating horses and producing other important innovations.

Along with the shoe, the cave yielded horns and bones of wild goats and red deer, as well as broken pottery and evidence of what may be the oldest known intentionally dried fruits: apricots, grapes and plums. The cave, first discovered in 1997, appears to have been used primarily by powerful people of high status for keeping this Chalcolithic community's ritual objects, as well as their harvest during the winter months each year. But other people, probably acting as guards, seem to have lived in the front portion of the cave.

One of the lead scientists excavating Areni-1, Dr Gregory Areshian of the University of California, Los Angeles, in the USA, said that the cave was also used by later civilizations, most recently by 14th-century Mongols, so he had assumed the shoe would be 600 to 700 years old. When separate laboratories at the University of Oxford in the UK and at the University of California at Irvine in the USA carbon-dated the leather to 3653 to 3627 BC, he said, 'We couldn't believe that a shoe could be so ancient.'

Perfectly preserved under a layer of sheep dung and thus sealed in a stable, cool, dry environment, the shoe, 24.5 cm long, was made of a single piece of cowhide. This was cut into two layers and vegetable oil was applied, which was probably quite a new technology at the time. The pieces of leather comprising the shoe were joined using leather cords which ran along front and back, and these were threaded through numerous holes in the body of the shoe. Although shoes made at this time were probably not specifically designed for the right or left foot as are modern ones, the Areni-1 shoe was worn on the right foot. 'You can see the imprint of the big toe,' said another team leader, Ron Pinhasi of University College Cork in Ireland. 'As the person was wearing it and lacing it, some of the eyelets had been torn and replaced.' The shoe had been deliberately placed in the pit where the archeologists found it. Its bed had been carefully lined with yellow clay. The shoe had been stuffed with grass either to hold its shape or perhaps for warmth for the wearer.

Protecting the foot was probably one of the main reasons people started wearing shoes, and this certainly seems the case for the Armenian leather shoe. According to Dr Areshian, the terrain around Areni-1 is very rugged and would have been difficult to walk on. Furthermore, shoes like this would have enabled people to cope with the extremes of temperature in the region - up to 45В°C in summer and -10В°C in winter - and to travel further. 'These people were walking long distances. We have found stones in the cave, which came from at least 120 kilometers away,' explained Dr Areshian.

Manolo Blahnik, an expert on shoe design, says that 'The (Armenian) shoe's function was obviously to protect the foot, but I am in no doubt that a certain appearance of a shoe meant belonging to a certain tribe.' He adds that it was probably part of the clothing which the wearer used to distinguish their identity.

Previously, the oldest known remains of a closed-toe leather shoe was one which belonged to Otzi the Iceman, a mummy found in the early 1990s in the Alps, near the Italian-Austrian border. That shoe, about 300 years younger than the Armenian shoe, had bearskin soles, deerskin sides and contained grass socks.

Footwear even older than the leather shoes includes examples of sandals made of plant fibers which have been found in Missouri and Oregon in the USA. The wearing of some type of footwear, though, is almost certainly far older than the oldest shoes so far discovered. For example, an analysis of toe bones found in 40,000-year-old fossils in China indicates that people had been wearing some type of shoe at that date. Drs Pinhasi and Areshian think it is plausible that shoes as we know them today originated somewhere in the Near East, around Armenia. 'Many other inventions, such as wheel-thrown pottery, cuneiform writing and sheep-wool production evolved in the ancient Near East,' Pinhasi says. 'And so it is quite plausible that Armenia may give us the earliest clue to a "prototype" shoe, which later spread to other parts of the world.'

Interestingly, the Armenian leather shoe found in Areni-1 is very similar to the 'pampooties' worn on the Aran Islands in the west of Ireland up to the 1950s. 'In fact, enormous similarities exist between the manufacturing technique and style of the Armenian shoe and those found across Europe at subsequent periods, suggesting that this type of shoe was worn for thousands of years across a large and environmentally diverse region,' said Dr Pinhasi.