Top 10 Discoveries of 2008 - Earliest Shoes - Tianyuan Cave, China

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(Mark Hatfield/iStockphoto)

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Earliest Shoes | Tianyuan Cave, China
(Courtesy Erik Trinkhaus/Hong Shang)

The toes of East Asia's oldest modern human show that our ancestors first began wearing shoes around 40,000 years ago, about the same time they developed more sophisticated toolkits and began creating elaborate art. Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, came to that conclusion after studying toe bones of the 42,000-year-old skeleton dubbed Tianyuan 1. Of indeterminate sex, the skeleton was discovered in a cave on the grounds of the Tianyuan Tree Farm, four miles southwest of the site of Zhoukoudian, where the so-called Peking Man fossils were discovered in the 1920s.

Trinkaus found that Tianyuan 1 had robust leg bones but that the toes were considerably more gracile, or slimmer, than those of earlier humans--who went without shoes for millions of years and had thick toes. When one walks barefoot, the middle toes curl into the ground to give traction during push off. But when wearing a shoe, a person pushes off with the big toe, placing less stress on the middle toes, resulting in less-developed toe bones. Trinkaus notes that the gracility of the toes is an individual pattern that develops during childhood. Tianyuan 1, it seems, had worn baby shoes.

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