- WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Ancient, 8,000-year-old shoes found in a Missouri cave
show that fashion in footwear is nothing new and, in fact, is much older
than anyone thought.
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- Scientists said Thursday that high-tech
dating procedures indicate that the shoes are at least 2,000 years older
than previously believed.
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- The shoes were found 40 years ago in
the Arnold Research Cave in Missouri, but, due to the mixing of deposits
around the shoes at the dig site, researchers were unable to assign an
age to them.
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- Michael O'Brien of the University of
Missouri and colleagues at Louisiana State University used an accelerator
mass spectrometer to carbon-date the shoes. It dated the oldest shoes at
up to 8,300 years old, the researchers reported in a study published Friday
in the journal Science.
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- "I was surprised," O'Brien
said Thursday. "I would have guessed 3,000 but not 8,000. I thought
it was so outrageous that I took a second sample."
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- Some of the shoes were sandals with pointed
toes. Others were round-toed slip- ons. "Some of them were round-cupped
heels like on a bedroom slipper, others had sling-back heels like you find
on women's shoes," O'Brien said.
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- Cushioned and durable
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- Most of the shoes were made with fibrous
plants that could be woven into a tough fabric used for the top, bottom
and sides of the footwear. O'Brien said the most common material was from
a yucca-like plant called rattlesnake master. The leaves were dried and
shaped into cording that was woven like modern-day espadrilles.
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- Both sandal and slip-on styles were found
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- There were also comfort innovations.
The moccasins were cushioned with grass that functioned "like a Dr.
Scholl's foot pad," said O'Brien.
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- "There's nothing new under the sun,"
he said. "Some of these shoes you would swear were made in a Mexican
market."
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- The shoes were also very durable, he
said. Of 35 samples recovered, 20 were complete or nearly complete. Even
though the shoes spanned thousands of years, O'Brien said the basic craftsmanship
was about the same.
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- "They did not invent something flimsy
that then got better over time," said O'Brien. "The earliest
shoe is every bit as well-made and as complex as those from later on."
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- 'They wore the heck out of these things'
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- O'Brien said the variety of styles and
differences in details suggests that there may have been concessions to
style or fashion.
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- "There was no ornamentation or color
that we know about, but my guess is that these shoes were very stylish
for the time," he said. "We know that people then were wearing
jewelry," and that it was likely that such artistic interest carried
over into the footgear.
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- Only the moccasins were made of leather,
and O'Brien said it is likely that the cave dwellers did not use leather
for shoes much earlier than that.
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- The style and construction of the Missouri
shoes are similar to specimens unearthed from a nearby site in the Ozark
Mountains but are different from shoes found in caves in Kentucky. They
are also very different from shoes constructed by the Anasazi people who
inhabited Southwest deserts.
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- Footwear got hard use among the prehistoric
Americans. They had to walk most places since there were no horses. They
had to hunt or gather all of their food and to haul water back to the cave
-- all jobs that took much walking.
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- "Many of the shoes wore down exactly
the way that our shoes do -- the ball of the foot and the heel," said
O'Brien. "In some instances there were repairs where they wove fiber
back into them. Other shoes were just tossed, but they wore the heck out
of these things."
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- A woman's 8 1/2
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- Foot size, he said, appears to be much
like that of modern humans. There is no way to tell if wearers of the ancient
shoes were male or female, but the average length was about 10 1/2 inches
-- about an 8 1/2 in modern American women's sizes.
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- "That suggests that these people
fell within the size range of people today," he said.
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- The cave, which is in a bluff not far
from the Missouri River, was a spectacular home by the standards of the
time.
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- "It was really perfect," said
O'Brien. "A great place to live."
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- O'Brien said that people lived there
for hundreds of generations, leaving layer after layer of debris: bone
and stone tools, animal bones, char from campfires and even some human
remains. Late in the occupancy, there were shards of pottery.
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- "The cave is so dry and has been
for the last 10,000 years that all this stuff is preserved," he said.
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- O'Brien said the finding was not a huge
scientific breakthrough, but interesting nevertheless. "To be honest,"
he said, "I think people think this is pretty cool stuff."
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