From a
NY Times article by Pam Belluck:
Think of it as a kind of prehistoric Prada: Archaeologists have discovered what they say is the world’s oldest known leather shoe.
Perfectly preserved under layers of sheep dung (who needs cedar closets?), the shoe, made of cowhide and tanned with oil from a plant or vegetable, is about 5,500 years old, older than Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids, scientists say. Leather laces crisscross through numerous leather eyelets, and it was worn on the right foot; there is no word on the left shoe.
While the shoe more closely resembles an L. L.Bean-type soft-soled walking shoe than anything by Jimmy Choo, “these were probably quite expensive shoes, made of leather, very high quality,” said one of the lead scientists, Gregory Areshian, of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
It could have fit a small man or a teenager, but was most likely worn by a woman with roughly size 7 feet.
There's more details about the archaelogical dig in the original article. Stuff like this...
The scientists, financed by the National Geographic Society and other institutions, also found skulls of three adolescents (“subadults,” in archaeology-speak) in ceramic vessels, suggesting ritualistic or religious practice; one skull, Dr. Areshian said, even contained desiccated brain tissue older than the shoe, about 6,000 years old.
And this...
Previously, the oldest known leather shoe belonged to Ötzi the Iceman, a mummy found 19 years ago in the Alps near the Italian-Austrian border. His shoes, about 300 years younger than the Armenian shoe, had bearskin soles, deerskin panels, tree-bark netting and grass socks. Footwear even older than the leather shoe includes examples found in Missouri and Oregon, made mostly from plant fibers.
Fascinating stuff. I'm always amazed that people can find objects this old that are in as good a condition as the above shoe. Now... if only they could find a fully outfitted Neanderthal. That would send me over the moon.
4 comments:
Ry,
when I read the Times article, I was fascinated.
I was struck by the use of eyes and the lace up technique.
Amazing stuff.
Kanna: It is good you commented because this made me realize I hadn't included the picture of the shoe as I intended.
Yes, we tend to think of people back 5500 years ago as "primitive" but the lacing and the shoe manufacture shows great skill given the primitive tools available at the time.
I read in some book somewhere that genetic analysis shows that we started wearing clothes about 40,000 to 60,000 years ago because they can look at the genes of body lice and tell exactly when the human variant of body lice "moved in", i.e. when we wore clothes to give them a nice home.
Another quaint fact: our body lice is from a different genetic line of descent than our public & head lice which made a home on us because we always had hairs in which they can hide.
I love the way science can unravel mysteries by squeezing facts until they scream and plodding along asking question after question. In my mind, science is the maker of the great medieval cathedrals of our modern culture, a great edifice of nearly infinite artistry and loving devotion: the great modern scientific theories.
(Right now I'm reading Graham Farmelo's The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom. He's a strange bird. He had to have been a sufferer of Asperger's Syndrome. He had a most interestingly introverted and odd social life. I'm in the midst of the book enjoying the chapters that lay out the oddity of his "courtship" with Manci Wigner, Eugene Wigner's sister. The woman had a lot of stamina to stalk and land the asocial Dirac. An amazing story! I like to think that there was a Dirac-like genius 20,000 years ago that invented the above shoe.)
RY,
I agree with you about the way the Sciences can squeeze more and more from "discoveries".
Just about the time we think we know something, it gets changed.
Ah mystery.
Kanna: My favourite bit of modern science is how humans have been demoted and demoted and demoted again. Back 300 years ago we looked up in the heavens and figured it was all about us. We were at the centre.
But then Copernicus demoted us to idling about a planet revolving the real centre, the Sun. But then by the early 19th century the Milky Way became the centre and we revolved around a bit that revolved around the centre.
Then in the 20th century we discovered there are 100 billion galaxies with a 100 billion suns like our own. We were getting squeezed to the margin.
Then late in the 20th century we discover that what we are and what we see is less than 4% of what is "out there". Dark energy currently accounts for 74% of the total mass-energy of the universe. And dark matter accounts for 23% of the mass-energy density of the observable universe, while the ordinary matter accounts for only 4.6% (the remainder is attributed to dark energy).
Now even our puny 4% is being threatened by theories such as Brane Cosmology where the central idea is that the visible, four-dimensional universe is restricted to a brane inside a higher-dimensional space, called the "bulk".
I laugh. We joke about being "shuffled off this mortal coil" but science is shuffling what we see, taste, and feel off to the tiniest corner of "the world" leaving our part to be a laughingly negligible remnant, an insignificant bit. As "details" we are an afterthought. It is pretty humbling, pretty humiliating, pretty depressing to be so insignificant. Oh well.
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