Posted on 06/05/2008 8:01:34 PM PDT by blam
First Shoes Worn 40,000 Years Ago
Maggie Koerth-Baker
Special to LiveScience
LiveScience.com
Thu Jun 5, 9:05 AM ET
Humans started wearing shoes about 40,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought, new anthropological research suggests.
As any good clothes horse knows, the right outfit speaks volumes about the person wearing it. Now, anthropologists are tapping into that knowledge base, looking for the physical changes caused by wearing shoes to figure out when footwear first became fashionable.
Turns out, clothes really do make the man (and the woman), at least when it comes to feet. That's because wearing shoes changes the way humans walk and how their bodies distribute weight. If you wear shoes regularly, as most modern humans do, those changes end up reflected in your bones and ligaments.
Susan Cachel, an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said science has known about the way wearing shoes affects feet since the early 20th century. Researchers have found several differences between feet that regularly wear shoes and those that don't.
For instance, wearing tight shoes can lead to bunions, which are painful enlargements of the bone or tissue in the big toe, she said. People who don't wear shoes have wider feet and bigger gaps between their big toe and the other four. And women who spend a lot of time in high heels wind up with smaller calf muscles.
Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, was the first person to apply this understanding of how fashion alters physical bodies to anthropology. He found a point in human history where the size of toe bones began to shrink. Combining that data with knowledge of how shoes change the way people walk, Trinkaus reasoned that smaller toe bones meant people had started wearing shoes.
While the oldest surviving shoes are only about 10,000 years old, Trinkaus' discovery pushed the adoption of footwear back to almost 30,000 years ago. He published that research in 2005. Now, thanks to analysis set to be published in the July 2008 issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, Trinkaus has found that humans were probably wearing shoes even earlier, about 40,000 years ago.
Through thick and thin
Trinkaus' theory is based on a simple fact: Bone size isn't set in stone.
"Bone, at least to a certain extent, responds during a person's lifetime to the mechanical stresses placed on it," said Tim Weaver, a University of California, Davis, anthropologist. "If you work out at the gym, not only will your muscles get bigger, your bones will become thicker."
For most of their history, humans had big, thick toe bones. Trinkaus said this was because they were doing more walking, climbing and carrying than we do today. In fact, he said, all their leg bones were bigger as well, for the same reasons. This is true for both Neanderthals and the earliest modern humans.
But, around 40,000 years ago, that began to change. Trinkaus noticed that skeletons from this time period still had strong, thick leg bones, but their toes had suddenly gotten smaller. "They had wimpy toes," he said. "I tried to figure out what would take away stresses on the toes, but not the legs, and the answer was shoes."
First shoes, first tailors
While Weaver agrees with Trinkaus' theory, Cachel doesn't buy it. She pointed out that, not long after the time period Trinkaus looked at, humans apparently stopped being so active and all their limb bones, not just the toes, started to shrink.
"If the footbones are smaller, this probably reflects less walking and physical activity, rather than the invention of supportive footware," Cachel said.
Both Weaver and Cachel think that it would make sense for shoes to hit it big around the time Trinkaus thinks they did. Around 40,000 and 30,000 years ago, human culture went through a growth spurt.
"The archaeological record shows may changes, including the types of tools people were making and the first definite artwork, and the oldest needles for making clothing appear shortly afterward," Weaver said.
And Cachel said this was probably the time period where a population boom allowed for the first divisions of labor, meaning that, for the the first time, somebody could dedicate all their time to making better, more decorated clothing.
"It seems reasonable that there were changes in footwear around this time too," Weaver said, "But before Erik Trinkaus' study we didn't have any direct evidence."
“This is an archaeology/antropology thread. Please take your religious comments to a religious thread.”
Thank you blam. Well said.
LOL.. I was going to leave it alone.. but I just gotta ask ya.... if 99.9% of folks believe a LIE does that somehow turn the LIE into TRUTH ??? seriously.... even your so-called science would NEVER say that something is true because x numbers of folks believe it to be so..... having said all that... I will leave it alone... at least on this thread.. anyone care to take this discussion offline I will be more than happy to engage..
FReegards,
David
YEC INTREP
Imelda Stonecracker
Hear hear!
Because God who has created this billions-of-years-old universe is more powerful than he can conceive of. That scares him, so he has to try to chop God down to a size he can imagine.
That's really all creationism is. Fear that God is more powerful and his universe grander than the creationists can imagine.
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Thanks Blam. I didn't check the topic for "soul/sole" jokes, so I'll refrain. For now. |
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“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.... Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by these who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”
-Augustine, On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis
FROM AN EMAIL:
Some tourists in the Chicago Museum of Natural History are marveling at the dinosaur bones. One of them asks the guard, “Can you tell me how old the dinosaur bones are?”
The guard replies, “They are 3 million, four years, and six months old.”
“That’s an awfully exact number,” says the tourist. “How do you know their age so precisely?”
The guard answers, “Well, the dinosaur bones were three million years old when I started working here, and that was four and a half years ago.”
[however, stating “40,000” as fact is offensive to ME.]
Hate to break this to you, but almost every astronomical object is a heck of a lot more than 40,000 light years away. That means almost everything you see looking up comes from thousands of times older events than a paltry 6000 years. This is science that no longer even gets debated.
Yeah. But were they gellin?
To God, a minute of his time could be 20 or even 60 million years of our time.
Just have to wait and ask him when we see him.
lighten up. People like you pop in and ruin a perfectly enjoyable thread with that crap.
Dustbunny,
Thanks for your comment and I would agree with you ONLY if you are referring to PRE-CREATION time... IN THE BEGINNING — GOD CREATED THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH -— from the momment God spoke the sun into existence and the made the earth start spinning that began the 24hr DAY as we know it today.. so POST-CREATION a DAY is 24hours PERIOD....
But thanks for sharing
FReegards,
David
aahhhhh the who speed of light thing.... I am no scientist.. but correct me if I am wrong the speed of light depends on atmospheric conditions correct? -— I believe that the speed of light was MUCH FASTER when God spoke the light into exisitence and was SLOWED DOWN to roughly its current rate when the 6 DAY project was complete..
Blam posts interesting anthropolgy articles here so people can learn a thing or two. Do you have to pollute his threads with your garbage? You jsut make FR look like it’s run by a bunch of ignorant goons.
Ignorance is bliss.
doc30,
I don’t have a problem when folks post their opinions — whether I agree with them or not.. — what I take issue with is posting an OPINION as if it were FACT ...
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