The History Of Shoes

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The History of Shoes November 11, 2011 ANT 360 Whether a person realizes it or not, they wear shoes every day. Even children who cannot walk are wearing shoes. Every department store has a shoe section and there are even whole stores devoted to shoes. Shoes are something we as humans need to survive. But where did shoes really come from? Who wore the first shoe, did the Neanderthals have some sort of primitive shoe? The shoe has changed greatly over the years, what the women and men wore in the 1600s are something that most men and women today would never wear and vice versa. There are so many different styles of shoes today, where did it all start? I myself have literally fifty pairs of shoes. I know people who have way more than me. What is this obsession with shoes? In this paper, I am going to research the first shoe to be worn and what followed. The world's oldest leather shoe, made from a single piece of cowhide laced with a leather cord along seams at the front and back, was found in a cave in Armenia in 2008 and is believed to date to 3,500 BC (Bellis 2009). Ötzi the Iceman's shoes, dating to 3,300 BC, featured brown bearskin bases, deerskin side panels, and a bark-string net, which pulled tight around the foot. (Figure A) However, tanned leather, the material most commonly used for making shoes, does not normally last for thousands of years, so shoes were probably in use long before this. (Figure B) It is very difficult to say exactly when the first shoe was worn since very few early shoes survived. The shoes that are in “good” condition are in collections around the world. Since scholars have very little to go by, they must rely on are secondary sources, such as paintings, sculptures, and tapestries, to find representations of footwear from the medieval period and earlier. However, the number of surviving examples dating from the seventeenth and

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