TBILISI (Xinhua) — Researchers in Armenia on Tuesday appealed to tourists and hobbyists to respect and protect of an Armenian cave where the world’s oldest leather shoe was found.
The director of the Armenian national academy of sciences, Pavel Avetisyan, made the appeal while addressing the press about the trouble enthusiastic tourists and hobbyists had been causing in and around the cave located near the Armenian village of Areni.
“Tourists bothered us a lot throughout our excavations by entering the cave without permission,” said the lead researcher. “They did not care that they could break something. So, after the excavations we decided to close access to the cave.”
Excavations, which began in 2007, have so far found a 5,500-year-old leather shoe, fragments of another old leather shoe, a goat mummy believed to be older than the Egyptian mummies, and a skirt made of reed which may turn out to be even older than the world’s oldest leather shoe found in the same cave.
The previous record of the world’s oldest leather shoe was the ones found on the feet of Otzi the Iceman, a 5,300-year-old body found frozen in an Austrian glacier.
wow every day Armenian land is surprising us
i love Archeology and this is making me loving it more since i’m Armenian and everyday something new is coming up 🙂
There is another issue of utter importance and that is whether all the findings are being recorded and saved in a safe place. If it was not for the publicity by western media, and the oldest shoe in the world was stolen, how would we really know that the shoe was discovered in the first place.