They are six thousand years old and are the oldest shoes in Europe.
Incredible find inside the Bat Cave in Andalusia, Spain: these are sandals woven from grass, dating back to the Neolithic, making them older than the 5,500-year-old leather shoes discovered in a cave in Armenia in 2008.
The shoes were part of ancient loot, looted by miners in the 1800s. But only today have they been analysed, in a new study which revealed that the collection of 76 objects found in the cave was around 2,000 years older than previously thought.
The low humidity and cold winds of the Spanish cave have kept the footwear unusually well preserved. The researchers also analyzed baskets and a series of tools.
These objects “constitute the oldest and best preserved assemblage of plant fiber materials known so far in southern Europe,” said study co-author María Herrero Otal. Different types of grass were used to make the analyzed sandals, the researchers said, but also other materials, such as leather and lime.
(Unioneonline/D)
