It's impossible to establish exactly
when our ancient progenitors began to wear a certain type of footwear capable of
pro- tecting the foot during the marches on uneven terrain and to keep it warm and/or dry in
periods of bad weather.
That's why these primitive shoes, presumably
consisting of not tanned leather fastened up the foot with laces made of the same material or layers of interlaced vegetable fibers fastened in the
same way, haven't resisted the ravages of the time and being made of
organic materials, have decomposed without leaving any trace in the
archaeological deposits.
Limiting our treatment to a brief period of the history
of the evolution of man, the advanced Pleistocene that conventionally began about 110.000 years ago, we don't know if the Neanderthal man,
who lived in the same ages, protected his feet with footwear of the
aforementioned type even if we know for certain that he belonged to a race of hunters
of large animals and had flint scrapings in its equipment of tools.
We can therefore presume that he used the hides of the animals
he hunted in order to protect the body from bad weather.
We can make a well-founded supposition on this
topic taking into consideration the oldest specimens of "Homo sapiens
sapiens", typical of all races living anywhere in the temperate zone,
belong appeared approximately 30.000 years ago.
They belong to the man of Cro-Magnon whose remains have
been found there and other localities of the Dordogne associated with very advanced tools.
He had a superior intellectual ability than that of
Neanderthal man, lived on a territory which extended from western Euro- pe to Iran,
practiced activities such as hunting and harvesting and left manufactured
articles made of stone, horn and animal bones such as reindeer, horse and mammoth.
Among these tools many are stone or bone drifts which
served to pierce the skins, bone needles for sewing, stone blades to flay and scrapers used to remove from the skins the residual flesh and
fat.
All this leads us to think that with the skins, it's
not known if and how they were tanned, he also made protection for his feet.
The first images of footwear worn by figures in Spanish
rock paintings go back approximately 15.000 years.
Referring to more recent periods (from 8.000 to 4.000
years ago) our ancestors began to live a more sedentary life, they learned to tame the
animals and to cultivate the land and had the incentive to use leather to make
shoes.
In the Fort Rock Cave site (Oregon - U.S.A.) have been
found some sandals of sagebrush bark (genus Artemisia) and these have been dated
from 9.000 BCE to 7.000 BCE
In the Arnold Research Cave site (Missouri -
U.S.A.) finds include 16 pairs of sandals and moccasins woven from plant fibers
and 2 hide pairs ranging in date from 6.000 BCE to about 1.000 CE.
In the Israeli state, near Jericho, on the so-called
"Cave of the warrior", remains of a man have been found buried about
4.000 years BCE.
In the Spanish small town of Albunől situated in province of Granada, the archaeologist Manuel de Góngora explored in
1.857 the cave known as cueva de los Murciélagos that contained a grave going back to
the fourth millennium BCE. The 69 skeletons that contained wore esparto hats, dresses and footwear.
A pair of sandals were part of the funeral wealth of
the deceased; they have leather rounded and wrapping up toes and the upper is made up of a piece of hide with cuts on the top for passing of leather
straps fastening the shoes to ankle.
Proof of the assumption that prehistoric man, from
at least the quaternary period, produced rough but efficient footwear was given
from the discovery on the Similaun glacier in Alto Adige (Italy), of the mummified
remains of a man which the C-14 analyses dated back to 3.300 BCE; at the time of the find the mummy
wore, besides clothes suitable to protect him from the cold of high altitudes,
the remains of a kind of boot with rawhide bear-skin soles
and deer-skin uppers strengthened with strings of woven grass and stuffed with hay to insulate the foot from
the cold.
This shoe was made of multiple pieces of leather and
woven grass while the footwear, we mostly see in finds from this period, are
single piece shoes wrapped up around the foot and tied with a thong.
in order to know something else about prehistoric men...
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