How it began
The shoe was found in 2008 in the Areni-1 cave in the Vayots Dzor province of Armenia by an international team led by Boris Gasparyan of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia. It is about 5,500 years old. The BBC noted that it is some 400 years older than Stonehenge and 1,000 years older than the Pyramids of Giza. Its maker lived long before the modern state, and the find is recorded for Armenia because of where the cave lies.
How it works
The shoe is made from a single piece of cowhide shaped to the foot, a design also described as a moccasin. It contained grass, which may have been used to keep the foot warm or to hold the shape of the shoe. It is about a UK size 5, so it could have been worn by a woman, though it could equally have fitted a man. The construction resembles techniques used in old European footwear.
What changed first
The find was published in the journal PLoS ONE in 2010 and widely reported. The shoe had survived in very good condition because of the cool, dry conditions in the cave and because it lay under a layer of sheep dung that sealed it. The same cave later yielded the wine press and fermentation vat that were reported in 2011 as the earliest known winery.
What lasted
The shoe is the oldest piece of leather footwear known to researchers. It gives direct evidence of how leather was cut and fitted to the foot in the Copper Age, and its likeness to later European footwear shows that this way of making shoes was long lived. Together with the winery, it made Areni-1 one of the best-known prehistoric sites in Armenia.
