The Oldest Leather Shoe

unprecedented information about an important and sparsely documented era: the Chalcolithic period or Copper Age, when humans are believed to have invented the wheel, as well as domesticating horses and producing other important innovations. Along with the shoe, the cave yielded horns and bones of wild goats and red deer, as well as broken pottery and evidence of what may be the oldest known intentionally dried fruits: apricots, grapes, and plums. The cave, first discovered in 1997, appears to have been used primarily by powerful people of high status for keeping the Chalcolithic community's ritual objects, as well as their harvest during the winter months each year. But other people, probably acting as guards, seem to have lived in the front portion of the cave. One of the lead scientists excavating Areni-1, Dr. Gregory Areshian of the University of California, Los Angeles, in the USA, said that the cave was also used by later civilizations, most recently by 14th-century Mongols, so he had assumed the shoe would be 600 to 700 years old. When separate laboratories at the University of Oxford in the UK and the University of California at Irvine in the USA carbon-dated the leather to 3653 to 3627 BC, he said, "We couldn't…