Recently recovered FarShores file
New technology - the same used for the Shroud of Turin and the "Ice Man" found in the Alps - dates the sandal back to about 6,000 B.C. University of Missouri anthropologist Michael O'Brien did some "sole" searching recently and discovered that the school had the oldest known shoe ever recovered in the Midwest - a sandal over 8,000 years old. "I knew we had some ancient shoes," O'Brien said. "But I had no idea exactly how old they were."
Since the 1950s, the school has collected several dozen rare, ragged sandals and slip-on shoes that professional and amateur archaeologists unearthed from a cave near Columbia, Mo. O'Brien knew the shoes predated those worn by the known tribes first encountered by European settlers, whose accounts told of mostly leather moccasins. "I knew from the fiber construction that ours had to be ancient," O'Brien said.
The ancient shoemakers used the leaves of a plant commonly called the rattlesnake master. Some were made of deer skin. No one wanted to date them using the carbon-14 method because it would have required destroying large portions of the shoes. But recent advances in accelerator mass spectrometry, the technique used to date the Shroud of Turin and "The Ice Man" discovered in the Alps, made it possible to test very small pieces. "We didn't need much, just a little piece of thread," O'Brien said. The results proved that the shoes were the oldest ever discovered east of the Rocky Mountains, he said.
One sandal predated the birth of Christ by more than 6,000 years. It had straw padding insoles and was secured with a braid through side loops, criss-crossed over the foot and tied at the ankle. Others were slip-ons and moccasins that were 1,000 to 7,000 years old. Older shoes worn by the Anasazi have been discovered in the dry Southwest. But few would have guessed the shoes could have survived the shifting Missouri climate.
"The cave was the perfect place for preserving fibrous footwear," O'Brien said. "It was a completely dry environment, no water running through it and a constant temperature and humidity level." The shoes were discovered among stone tools, arrowheads and pieces of pottery that date even farther back than the shoes. The evidence suggests the cave was first occupied 11,000 years ago.
Through the millenniums, hunters and gatherers and later farming peoples lived near the mouth of the cave, which is about 200 feet deep. These are the rugged sandals and slip-ons they wore to chase down wounded prey, ford swift creeks and sow squash and other vegetables in the fertile flood plain of the Missouri River.
These cave dwellers knew a thing or two about shoes styles. New and virtually identical versions of their sling-back and slip-on styles are the rage at environmentally friendly footwear stores in area malls. The fibers, some looking as fine as human hair, were carefully twist-twined and interlaced to make the shoes' four major components - sole, toe, back and vamp. The average length of the shoes is about 27 centimeters. "One is 24 centimeters, which is equal to a woman's size 7 1/2," O'Brien said. "I know because I measured it on my secretary."
All the shoes showed normal wear - mud crammed into sole crevices, fraying and broken parts. "They wore out just like ours, at the ball of the foot and the heel," O'Brien said. There's one small, like-new leather moccasin that O'Brien figured belonged to a child. Was it lost? Outgrown? O'Brien concedes that the ancients may simply have exhibited the thoroughly timeless human tendency to hang on to old shoes.
