SAEDNEWS: Human beings have always sought to understand those who lived before them, constantly searching for clues that can reveal the way our ancestors lived, their discoveries, and the details of their everyday lives.
According to Saed News Analytical Base, sometimes objects are found that astonish everyone—discoveries that disrupt long-held assumptions about the past and transform our understanding of human history. One such object that has deeply surprised archaeologists is an exceptionally ancient shoe, now recognized as the oldest leather shoe in the world.
An international team of archaeologists has uncovered the world’s oldest leather footwear.
The Areni-1 shoe, discovered in 2008, dates back 5,500 years and is considered the earliest known leather shoe on Earth.
Today, finding a stylish and comfortable pair of shoes is a real challenge. But discovering a shoe that is both fashionable and functional—and has survived millennia—is something far beyond a challenge.
When you finally find the right pair of shoes, it seems impossible to part with them. Yet, as we all know, everything in this world has a lifespan—or almost everything.
If you take proper care of your shoes and they are made from genuine leather, their useful lifespan may increase. But the real question is: by how much?
Fifty years? A century? A thousand years?
How about 5,500 years?
Yes—you read that correctly. The world’s oldest leather shoe is 5,500 years old.
The shoe predates Stonehenge, the Egyptian pyramids, and even the footwear associated with Ötzi the Iceman.
It is said that the shoe was “well-preserved,” though that phrase hardly does justice to its condition. The footwear was astonishingly intact—so intact that when archaeologists first found it, they assumed it was no more than 700 years old.
Initially, researchers believed it belonged to a previous civilization, possibly from the Mongol era around the 14th century CE, when people lived in caves.
But laboratory analyses told a different story. Radiocarbon tests conducted at labs in Oxford and California delivered shocking results: the archaeologists’ predictions were not even close.
The tests showed that this extraordinary shoe is between 5,387 and 5,637 years old. The archaeologists working at the Armenian site struggled to believe that a leather shoe could survive for so many millennia.
Until these groundbreaking lab results were released, the oldest known closed-toe footwear was associated with Ötzi the Iceman, discovered by two hikers in the Ötztal Alps in September 1991.
Areni is a cave near the borders of Armenia, Iran, and Turkey, located in the village of Areni. Several years ago, an Armenian-Irish archaeological team excavated the site, uncovering highly valuable artifacts dating back to the 3rd and 4th millennia BCE.
According to the findings, the Areni Cave was used continuously from the Neolithic era through the 12th century CE. Among the many discoveries—metal knives, textiles, and seeds from 40 types of fruit—the most remarkable find was the ancient leather shoe.
The cave also revealed the world’s oldest known winery, a discovery that astonished researchers even further. Yet the most significant artifact remains the leather shoe—an object that has both amazed the public and challenged archaeological understanding.
This extraordinary discovery is the same leather shoe that continues to astonish everyone and redefine what we know about prehistoric craftsmanship.
