Oregon shoe, possibly world's oldest, hits the bigtime

KGW-TV ^ | 8/27/2006 | Associated Press

[SunkenCiv]

University of Oregon archaeologist Pam Endzweig escorted what may be the oldest shoe on earth to Washington, D.C., recently to be featured in the current edition of the National Geographic... On page 79, a sandal woven of sagebrush bark more than 300 generations ago sits softly lit on a sheet of coarse brown paper, one of 11 examples of footwear illustrating the article "Why Every Shoe Tells a Story." ...The story of the Fort Rock sandals is well known, at least in Oregon. The U of O's Museum of Natural and Cultural History houses a cache of the ancient sandals found by the U of O's Luther Cressman in a Central Oregon cave in 1938... Perhaps no other photograph in the pictorial has more to say about human culture. The frayed, worn sandal was perhaps worn next to a campfire at a time when the pyramids were just a gleam in the pharaohs' eyes.

[SunkenCiv]

---

· X-Planets ping list · join list or digest · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark ·

---

[SunkenCiv]

I wonder what tongue the people who made it spoke. [rimshot!]

To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. Thanks.

Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on or off the
"Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list or GGG weekly digest
-- Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)

[TheRobb7]

Aren't old shoes more comfortable?.....

[Eaker]

It is obvious that these people didn't have dogs.

At least not min-pins.

There are no old shoes in my world.

[Fred Nerks]

"With these sandals you've got the element of continuity. They were making sandals 10,000 years ago, and they're still making sandals today."

BECAUSE THEY HAD FEET!

[ferri]

wow! found a few pictures here: Old Shoes

[SunkenCiv]

related:

Bones reveal first shoe-wearers
BBC | 8/24/05 | Olivia Johnson
Posted on 08/25/2005 1:06:07 AM EDT by LibWhacker
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1470209/posts

Aching Feet? Early Humans Figured Out Solutions
MSNBC | 8-20-2005 | Erik Trinkaus
Posted on 09/27/2005 9:34:57 PM EDT by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1492521/posts

Prehistoric 'Shoes' Better Than Modern Hiking Boots (Iceman/Otzi)
Ananova | 6-20-2003
Posted on 06/22/2003 12:40:50 PM EDT by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/933617/posts

[SunkenCiv]

Ten thousand years of development? You'd think they'd have gotten them right by now.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks!

"Cressman found dozens of sandals below a layer of volcanic ash, subsequently determined to come from the eruption of the Mt. Mazama volcano 7500 years ago."

[SunkenCiv]

Hope you live in a warm climate. :')

[SunkenCiv]

That may be their *sole* advantage.

[Eaker]

South Texas.

Stickers and rattle snakes are a problem.

Frost bite ain't!

[DieHard the Hunter]

> Stickers and rattle snakes are a problem.

Dunno about stickers: kids DownUnder don't start wearing shoes until they're twenty-one. Might cause problems with tenderfoots. What are they, prickly things I guess?

Rattlesnakes shouldn't be a problem at all, tho', even in Texas -- all you need about fifteen feet of #8 fencing wire. Fold it in half and twist it tight, into a seven-foot whip. When Mr Rattlesnake shows his ugly mug, *whap* *whap* *whap*. Three times should be adequate to give him serious back injury problems that no chiropractor could ever fix -- if not kill him stone dead.

Thereafter, hike barefoot in perfect safety from Mr Rattlesnake if you want.

[Knitting A Conundrum]

It ought to be illegal for news sites to release stories like this with no pics....

[blam]

Sagebrush bark fiber, Fort Rock Cave, Oregon, 8500 B.C.

National Geographic
Photograph by Mitchell Feinberg
By Cathy Newman

Ease your hand gently along the insole of the sagebrush bark fiber sandal in the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History, and you can feel the imprint of a big toe in what may be the world's oldest existing example of footwear. The sandal, found in Fort Rock Cave in central Oregon in 1938, may be 10,500 years old, and was worn by a native North American who lived in caves during the winter months and hunted in marshes in summer.

"These are the traces of human lives," says Tom Connolly, the museum's research director. "The worn heel pockets on the sandals; the charred pinpricks on the toe flaps allow you to put yourself at a fireside. There's the sense you get from an assemblage of sandals here, those big and worn, small and child-size, those caked in mud, that allows you to see them as products of real human families: mom, kids, dad, grandparents."

Though humans may have wrapped their feet in skins earlier, Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, says sturdy shoes originated between 40,000 and 26,000 years ago. Trinkaus studied the foot bones of Neandertals living 100,000 to 40,000 years ago, compared them with the more delicate foot bones of our ancestors living 26,000 years ago, and concludes that shoe wearers developed weaker toes because of the reduced stress and increased support footwear allows. From there, shoes evolved like stone tools and art, with other advances in human culture.

Jenna Tedrick Kuttruff, a textile expert at Louisiana State University, points out that of the group of fiber sandals (some as old as 8,000 years) found in a Missouri cave she has examined, no two are alike. "The wearers of these shoes lived a subsistence existence," she says. "They didn't need to make each pair different. But it's human nature to make things visually appealing, to make one pair a little more complex than others to set it apart from someone else's." The desire to wear something different, distinctive, and decorative—that is to say, the instinct for fashion—has been around for a very long time.

[DieHard the Hunter]

Wow. If somebody wanted to make a modern pair of these, I'd test-drive them. They look quite comfortable.

[SunkenCiv]

No pictures are the lace of our worries. [rimshot!]

[Michael.SF.]

How long until Birkenstock names a model of shoes after this?

[ElkGroveDan]

Probably stolen from it's owner by some heel.

[Dustbunny]

Wow, that is so neat!!!