The rare leather shoe, 15cm high, considered the oldest pair of shoes in the world, was discovered to be a toddler shoe from the ancient Bronze Age, dating from 888 to 781 BC BC. These are believed to be shoes that an ancient baby dropped 3,000 years ago, and they have survived in a river bed in north Kent.
A phenomenon that most parents understand well is the feeling of returning home, opening the door and realizing that your child has, for some reason, lost a shoe. Scientists agree that this may be an emotional state that billions of parents have experienced over the centuries.
It is worth noting that from that time until now, at least 62 billion people have lived and walked on Earth, and many of them may also have faced the problem of losing shoes similar to what It’s common for parents today.
The rare Bronze Age 15cm leather shoe is thought to be the oldest found in the UK and was found by archaeologist Steve Tomlinson, 51, as he was mudlarking in September
A Bronze Age leather shoe (pictured) thought to be the oldest in the UK was unearthed in north Kent riverbed
Archaeologist Steve Tomlinson, 51, (pictured) discovered the 3,000-year-old shoe that belonged to a toddler
A micro-CAT scan (pictured) of the shoe discovered that the sole was made from several layers
Mr Tomlinson, from Ramsgate, Kent, didn’t think much of the find at first but sent it for carbon-dating at a unit in East Kilbride, Scotland.
I sent it off for carbon-dating and five weeks later I got a call from a gentleman at the lab who said to me, “I think you better sit down for this”.
‘I’d had a good day’s mudlarking that day – I’d found quite a few Roman pottery shards – but I was not expecting that.
‘I could’ve quite easily missed it but I had an inkling it was something special.
‘It’s absolutely fascinating.’
The shoe is 15cm long, meaning in today’s terms the child would have been a size seven
The child is thought to have been around two or three years old and scientists will do DNA tests to try to determine whether the show’s owner was a boy or a girl
An X-ray carried out at Canterbury Christchurch University found the underside of the sole is imprinted with a textile pattern
In today’s sizes the shoe would be a size seven and archaeologists think its owner was around two or three years old.
Mr Tomlinson said he is ‘confident’ it is the oldest of its kind in the UK and possibly the smallest in the world.
He said: ‘It’s a tiny little thing really.’
‘We hope professionals might be able to reconstruct it eventually and that it might go into the British Museum down the line.
‘It’s of incredible national interest.’
The shoe is now in the care of heritage scientist and archaeological conservator Dana Goodburn-Brown, 63, who specialises in micro-excavation.
Ms Goodburn-Brown said: ‘Organic materials like leather, textiles or wood will not survive unless they’re somewhere very arid or in mud without oxygen.
This shoe has been in a silt environment with sediment, without oxygen.
‘It’s what we call anaerobic conditions .
‘It gets to this equilibrium state where it doesn’t biodegrade. That’s why it’s so rare.
‘It’s amazing that it survived so long.
‘The fact that it dislodged from elsewhere and Steve came across it before it started to degrade is incredible.
We don’t know where it originated but it’s most likely it was either washed out with cliff erosion, which happens quite regularly in Kent, or emerged during dredging.
Dana, from Sittingbourne, Kent, took the shoe to experts at the University of Kent who examined it under a micro-CT scanner, where they discovered the sole was made up of several layers.
More significantly, an X-ray carried out at Canterbury Christchurch University found the underside of the sole is imprinted with a textile pattern, suggesting it had either been wrapped in or pressed against a piece of material for some time.
The next step is to send the leather for DNA testing to see what they can learn about the shoe’s original owner.
Scientists might even be able to tell whether the toddler was a boy or a girl and what animal the leather came from.