PhD student finds world's oldest leather shoe

10 Jun '10

5 min read

The oldest known footwear in the world, to the present time, are sandals, made of plant material, that were found in a cave in the Arnold Research Cave in Missouri in the US. Other contemporaneous sandals were found in the Cave of the Warrior, Judean Desert, Israel, but these were not directly dated, so that their age is based on various other associated artefacts found in the cave.

Interestingly, the shoe 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 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,” said Dr Pinhasi.

“We do not know yet what the shoe or other objects were doing in the cave or what the purpose of the cave was,” said Dr Pinhasi. “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.” The team will continue to excavate the many chambers of the cave.

The team involved in the dig included; lead author and co-director, Dr Ron Pinhasi, Archaeology Department, University College Cork, Cork; Mr Boris Gasparian, co-director and Ms Diana Zardaryan of the Institute of Archaeology and Enthography, National Academy of Sciences, Republic of Armenia; Dr Gregory Areshian, co-director, Research Associate at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, US; Dr Alexia Smith, Department of Anthropology of the University of Connecticut, US, Dr Guy Bar-Oz , Zinman Institute of Archaeology, University of Haifa, Israel and Dr Thomas Higham, Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, University of Oxford, UK.

The research received funding from the National Geographic Society, the Chitjian Foundation (Los Angeles) US, Mr Joe Gfoeller of the Gfoeller Foundation, US, the Steinmetz Family Foundation, US, the Boochever Foundation, US, and the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA, US.

University College Cork