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LiveScience
LiveScience
Charles Q. Choi

When did humans start wearing shoes?

Woven sagebrush sandals unearthed from Fort Rock Cave, Lake County, Oregon, United States, on exhibit at the Oregon Historical Society Museum in Portland .

Scientists have discovered many ancient shoes around the world, including 5,500-year-old leather shoes in Armenia, 6,200-year-old grass sandals in Spain, and footwear as old as 8,300 years old in Missouri.

But when did humans actually invent shoes? That's tricky to answer because the animal skins, plant fibers and other materials used to make shoes tend to break down over time. The oldest known shoes are more than 10,000 years old, but our ancestors may have worn them much earlier than that, fossilized footprints suggest.

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