Paris: Proving fashion changes little over time, a just-found 5,500-year leather moccasin said to be the world’s oldest leather shoe may be the ancestor to ‘’pampooties’’ worn in Ireland only half a century ago.
The perfectly preserved cow-hide shoe, 1,000 years older than Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza, is a moccasin-like piece in a single piece of leather shaped to fit the wearer’s foot, according to a team of archeologists led by Ron Pinhasi, of Ireland’s University of Cork.
“Interestingly, the shoe is very similar to the ‘pampooties’ worn on the Aran Islands (in the west of Ireland) up to the 1950s,” said Pinhasi.
A small 37 European size (US 7), the footwear found in Vayotz Dzor province on the Armenian-Iranian border could have belonged to either a man or a woman, according to the findings published in online journal PLoS One.
