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Copper Age Prada? World’s Oldest Leather Shoe Found

Copper Age Prada? World’s Oldest Leather Shoe Found

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Prada doesn’t have anything on this leather shoe. A 5,500 year old moccasin-like shoe – reportedly in excellent shape – was found in a cave in Armenia.

A Manolo Blahnik it isn’t.

Still, the world’s oldest known leather shoe, revealed Wednesday, struck one of the world’s best known shoe designers as shockingly au courant. “It is astonishing,” Blahnik said via email, “how much this shoe resembles a modern shoe!”

Stuffed with grass, perhaps as an insulator or an early shoe tree, the 5,500-year-old moccasin-like shoe was found exceptionally well preserved—thanks to a surfeit of sheep dung—during a recent dig in an Armenian cave.

About as big as a current women’s size seven (U.S.), the shoe was likely tailor-made for the right foot of its owner, who could have been a man or a woman—not enough is known about Armenian feet of the era to say for sure.

Read more at National Geographic