Some of the shoes found are more than 8,000 years old

In this story:

• Cushioned and durable
• 'They wore the heck out of these things'
• A woman's 8 1/2
• Related sites

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Ancient, 8,000-year-old shoes found in a Missouri cave show that fashion in footwear is nothing new and, in fact, is much older than anyone thought.

Scientists said Thursday that high-tech dating procedures indicate that the shoes are at least 2,000 years older than previously believed.

The shoes were found 40 years ago in the Arnold Research Cave in Missouri, but, due to the mixing of deposits around the shoes at the dig site, researchers were unable to assign an age to them.

Michael O'Brien of the University of Missouri and colleagues at Louisiana State University used an accelerator mass spectrometer to carbon-date the shoes. It dated the oldest shoes at up to 8,300 years old, the researchers reported in a study published Friday in the journal Science.

"I was surprised," O'Brien said Thursday. "I would have guessed 3,000 but not 8,000. I thought it was so outrageous that I took a second sample."

Some of the shoes were sandals with pointed toes. Others were round-toed slip-ons. "Some of them were round-cupped heels like on a bedroom slipper, others had sling-back heels like you find on women's shoes," O'Brien said.

Cushioned and durable

Most of the shoes were made with fibrous plants that could be woven into a tough fabric used for the top, bottom and sides of the footwear. O'Brien said the most common material was from a yucca-like plant called rattlesnake master. The leaves were dried and shaped into cording that was woven like modern-day espadrilles.

Both sandal and slip-on styles were found

There were also comfort innovations. The moccasins were cushioned with grass that functioned "like a Dr. Scholl's foot pad," said O'Brien.

"There's nothing new under the sun," he said. "Some of these shoes you would swear were made in a Mexican market."

The shoes were also very durable, he said. Of 35 samples recovered, 20 were complete or nearly complete. Even though the shoes spanned thousands of years, O'Brien said the basic craftsmanship was about the same.

"They did not invent something flimsy that then got better over time," said O'Brien. "The earliest shoe is every bit as well-made and as complex as those from later on."

'They wore the heck out of these things'

O'Brien said the variety of styles and differences in details suggests that there may have been concessions to style or fashion.

"There was no ornamentation or color that we know about, but my guess is that these shoes were very stylish for the time," he said. "We know that people then were wearing jewelry," and that it was likely that such artistic interest carried over into the footgear.

Only the moccasins were made of leather, and O'Brien said it is likely that the cave dwellers did not use leather for shoes much earlier than that.

The style and construction of the Missouri shoes are similar to specimens unearthed from a nearby site in the Ozark Mountains but are different from shoes found in caves in Kentucky. They are also very different from shoes constructed by the Anasazi people who inhabited Southwest deserts.

Footwear got hard use among the prehistoric Americans. They had to walk most places since there were no horses. They had to hunt or gather all of their food and to haul water back to the cave -- all jobs that took much walking.

"Many of the shoes wore down exactly the way that our shoes do -- the ball of the foot and the heel," said O'Brien. "In some instances there were repairs where they wove fiber back into them. Other shoes were just tossed, but they wore the heck out of these things."

A woman's 8 1/2

Foot size, he said, appears to be much like that of modern humans. There is no way to tell if wearers of the ancient shoes were male or female, but the average length was about 10 1/2 inches -- about an 8 1/2 in modern American women's sizes.

"That suggests that these people fell within the size range of people today," he said.

The cave, which is in a bluff not far from the Missouri River, was a spectacular home by the standards of the time.

"It was really perfect," said O'Brien. "A great place to live."

O'Brien said that people lived there for hundreds of generations, leaving layer after layer of debris: bone and stone tools, animal bones, char from campfires and even some human remains. Late in the occupancy, there were shards of pottery.

"The cave is so dry and has been for the last 10,000 years that all this stuff is preserved," he said.

O'Brien said the finding was not a huge scientific breakthrough, but interesting nevertheless. "To be honest," he said, "I think people think this is pretty cool stuff."