The World’s Oldest Leather Shoe

The world’s oldest leather shoes were, until recently, the pair found with the body of Ötzi, the famous Iceman, dated at about 5,300 years ago. But a cave in Armenia has yielded a leather shoe that is about 200 years older than Ötzi’s footwear.

The shoe, actually more of a moccasin, appears to be made of cowhide cut in a single piece and laced together with leather thongs. It is relatively small (U.S. women’s size 7 or a European size 37), and may have been worn by a woman, a small man, or a teenager.
The shoe is remarkably similar to footwear worn until the 1950s in the Aran Islands west of Ireland, and also to a traditional Balkan shoe known as an opanke, which is still worn as part of traditional costumes worn at regional festivals. Researchers say that nearly identical shoes were worn across Europe over the course of thousands of years.

The shoe is currently housed at the Institute of Archaeology in Yerevan, but may be sent to either Switzerland or Germany to be properly preserved and then returned to Armenia.

Strictly speaking, while this shoe, along with Ötzi’s shoe, are the oldest still in existence at this time, there is evidence based on the weakening of small toe bones in ancient fossils that indicate humans may have been wearing shoes as long as 40,000 years ago. It is highly unlikely, however, that shoes that old would have survived, so for the time being, at least, the Armenian shoes hold the record as the world’s oldest leather shoes.

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