Photo:Charles Helm
When were the first shoes created and worn?
Three sites in South Africa featuring prints from early human ancestors bear some striking signs of footwear.
As described in a paper inIchnos, researchers are working towards developing techniques to recognize shod-hominin tracks.
Photo:Charles Helm
Investigating theorigin of the shoeis just beginning.
Three sets of Middle Stone Age prints fossilized in rock were analyzed.
Prints at Kleinkrantz were dated by rock analysis to be between 79,000 and 148,000 years old.
Photo:Charles Helm
Prints at Goukamma are similarly between 73,000 and 136,000 years ago.
A third set studied are in Addo Elephant National Park.
All three sets of prints look suspiciously different from typical fossilized footprintsno toe marks.
While the shoes themselves are lost to history, their soleprint suggests straps.
The team compared the prehistoric prints to ones they made themselves using shoes which might be similar in construction.
If in fact shoe prints, these could be the earliest known example of footwear.
A similarly aged example is a set of 130,000-year-old Neanderthal child prints in Greece.
