14 DAY TRIAL // Shoes have become a cultural item and what you wear tells a lot about you. They even represent a sexual item: some women look first at a man's shoes in order to assess certain things about him. Men do the same thing regarding women.
But the question is: when did people start wearing shoes? A new research to be published in the "Journal of Archaeological Science" shows that it was around 40,000 years ago.
Of course, footwear is hard to be preserved over time, and the oldest known shoes (rope sandals attached to the feet with string) were dated around 10,000 B.C. Wearing shoes changes the middle-toe bones in a manner that can be tracked down in fossils.
"When you walk barefoot, your middle toes curl into the ground to give you traction as you push off. If you regularly wear Nikes, moccasins or any other type of shoe, you actually wind up pushing off with your big toe, with less force going through the middle toes," explained co-author Erik Trinkaus, a Washington University anthropologist and one of the world's leading experts on early human evolution.
Small-toe bones fossilize rarely, but the research team could investigate some of the oldest toes found, coming from a Homo sapiens, a 40,000-year-old skeleton encountered in Tianyuan Cave near Zhoukoudian, China. Middle toes were also investigated in a 27,500-year-old Russian skeleton, but also in Neanderthal, modern Pueblo and Inuit skeletons, also having such bones.
Both the Chinese and Russian individuals had light-built middle-toe bones compared to their body size. The Russian skeleton was accompanied by individuals displaying an abundance of ivory beads around their ankles and feet, pointing that they could have worn adorned shoes.
The usually barefoot Pueblo Amerindians had much thicker middle toe bones, the shoe-wearing Inuit, with a very active lifestyle, displayed thinner middle toe bones, while the Neanderthal had ultra-thick middle toe bones.
"The date of the first footwear corresponds with an important time in human history. A cultural evolution was starting. We start to see all kinds of changes, such as more elaborate toolkits and the beginnings of art. The findings about footwear are another piece in the puzzle," Trinkaus told Discovery News.
Some doubt that Neanderthals did not wear footgear.
"Considering that they lived in Europe primarily during glacial periods, I find it highly improbable that they did not wear some type of footwear, so what I think is most likely is that they wore some type of soft wraps on their feet that did not alter their locomoter biomechanics of their feet the way a stiff-soled shoe would," Trenton Holliday, an associate professor of anthropology at Tulane University, told Discovery News.
"Neanderthals might have frequently gone barefoot. Some individuals even today still don't wear shoes and live in very cold environments, such as in the hills of Eastern Bulgaria and Romania," counteracted Trinkaus.