If the shoe fits - footwear of ancient civilizations - Brief Article

Science World, Oct 19, 1998 by Mark Bregman

From sneakers to sandals, from high-tops to high heels, shoes make many teens shop till they drop. And while fit may rate high on your scorecard, nothing beats scoring the absolutely latest styles. Well, get a load of these models!

From an ancient garbage dump in a Missouri River cave, archaeologists (scientists who study remains of past peoples) have uncovered shoes ranging in age from 800 to 8,000 years old. Researchers' biggest surprise: "Fads and fashion are as old as civilization" says Michael O'Brien, a University of Missouri archaeologist. "Like fins on the back of a Buick, shoe models went in and out of style"

What trendsetters made and discarded these shoes? Hunters and gatherers who were ancestors of Native American Indian tribes, O'Brien says. And the Missouri cave's constant dry conditions helped preserve the shoes' top-notch quality. "Not a drop of water touched them," he says.

The shoes, some originally excavated in the 1950s, sat in storage at the University of Missouri for decades before O'Brien and his colleagues took a closer look. "We were waiting for a new and more accurate form of carbon dating before we measured the shoes' ages," he says. Briefly, here's how carbon dating works: When all plants and animals die, a radioactive element called carbon-14 within them starts to decay at a constant and known rate. By measuring how much carbon-14 remains in the object, scientists can calculate how old it is. But standard carbon dating requires large amounts of material to accurately indicate its age. "We would've had to sacrifice half a shoe in order to figure out how old it was," O'Brien says.

Enter a new method of dating called accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS), which allowed O'Brien to test just a few of the shoes' fibers to date them. Fibers are fed into a machine I that spews out a digital printout of their age. AMS measures tiny samples with far greater sensitivity than standard carbon dating. "I was stunned to find that some shoes were 8,000 years old," says O'Brien.

The variety of sandals and slip-ons were woven from leaves of a yucca-like plant called "rattlesnake master." (Inhabitants may have used the plant as a remedy for snakebites.) The tough fiber enjoyed widespread popularity, O'Brien explains: "Shoes of the same material have been found in Kentucky caves, too." Do you think your Nikes will last as long? Don't bet on it.