Sunday, October 29, 2017

The Oldest Leather Shoe

From Vintage News:
The life span of high-quality leather shoes can be increased if one takes proper care of the material. But, we must ask, increased by how much? Maybe by up to 50 years? A Century? A Millennium? How about 5,500 years? Yes, you read that correctly, because the world’s oldest leather shoe is 5,500 years old. It predates Stonehenge, is much older than the Egyptian pyramids and the shoe found on Ötzi the Iceman.

To say that this leather shoe is well preserved might not be sufficient to describe its condition, as it looks astonishingly good. In fact, it was in such good condition that the archaeologists who discovered it thought that the shoe could not be more than 700 years old. They initially thought that the shoe probably dated back to a later civilization, most likely the Mongol period, who used caves in the 14th century.

However, examining the material in the two radiocarbon laboratories in Oxford and California produced surprising results and proved that the primary assumptions made by the archaeologists were not even close to what the laboratories showed. It was stated that it was 5,637 to 5,387 years old and archaeologists who worked on the site in Armenia simply couldn’t believe that a shoe could be so ancient. (Read more.)
Share

No comments: