In addition to partially mummified bodies, a total of 22 sandals, baskets and wooden tools were found in the burial site located in the cave.
Spanish researchers report that they have managed to date the oldest shoes found in Europe. Shoes found in Spain are estimated to be around 6,000 years old. The research was reported by, among others, the British Broadcasting Corporation BBC and a US news channel CNN.
Stone Age shoes were found as early as 1857, when miners looted a prehistoric grave they found in a cave in the province of Andalusia, reported CNN.
The shoes were deemed worthless and left in the Cueva de los Murciélagos, or in Finnish the Cave of the Bats. According to CNN, ten years later, a Spanish archaeologist visited the cave and delivered dozens of Stone Age artifacts he found there to Spanish museums.
In the cave In addition to partially mummified bodies, a total of 22 sandals, baskets and wooden tools were found in the burial site located in According to the researchers, the shoes may have originally been on the feet of the corpses.
The objects were preserved in the cave because its air is cool and very dry.
Some of the objects found in the cave are even older than the 6,000-year-old sandals. According to the researchers, it seems that the cave was first used by hunter-gatherers in the Stone Age and then by farmers. According to the BBC, some objects turned out to be 9,000 years old in new studies.
The shoes were already studied in the 1970s, but then their age was estimated to be a thousand years less than in a recent study. Grass, natural fibers and leather have been used as materials for what are probably the oldest shoes in Europe. Some of the sandals were worn out, but some were unused.
According to researchers from Barcelona’s UAB University and Alcalá University, the age of the shoes was determined by radiocarbon dating. Research was published In Science Advances.
Durable the invention of shoes is usually dated only after the development of agriculture, about 10,000 years ago.
HS news at the beginning of September, that footprints found at three archaeological excavation sites in South Africa show that people used sandals as early as 100,000 years ago, say Nelson Mandela University researchers.
If the observation is correct, it considerably prematures the perception of adopting the use of shoes.
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