Areni-1 shoe

The Areni-1 shoe is a 5,500-year-old leather shoe that was found in 2008 in excellent condition in the Areni-1 cave complex located in the Vayots Dzor province of Armenia. It is a one-piece leather-hide shoe that has been dated as a few hundred years older than the one found on Ötzi the Iceman, making it the oldest piece of leather footwear in the world known to contemporary researchers. Much older footwear, 10,000-year-old sandals made of sagebrush fiber, has been discovered in the United States at Fort Rock Cave in Oregon. By evidence found to date, the use of shoes arose between 40,000 and 26,000 years ago. The discovery was made by an international team led by Boris Gasparyan, an archaeologist from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia (co-directors of the project are Ron Pinhasi from University College Cork in Ireland, and Gregory Areshian from UCLA).

An Armenian post-graduate student, Diana Zardaryan, discovered the leather shoe in the course of excavations by a team of archeologists from Armenia’s Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Ireland and the United States. The shoe was found upside down at the base of a shallow, rounded, and plastered pit that was 45 cm (18 in) deep and 44–48 cm (17–19 in) wide, beneath an overturned broken Chalcolithic ceramic bowl. A broken pot and goat horns also were found nearby. Excavations in the same area also found the world's oldest wine-making site.

The research was funded by the National Geographic Society, the Chitjian Foundation, the Gfoeller Foundation, the Steinmetz Family Foundation, the Boochever Foundation and the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. The team's findings were published on June 9, 2010, in the journal PLoS ONE.

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