a 5,500-year-old leather shoe found 2010

Courtesy for photo and text: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areni-1_shoe

The oldest piece of leather footwear in the world

FOUND IN CAVE BY POST-GRAD STUDENT. The Areni-1 shoe is a 5,500-year-old leather shoe found in good shape in 2010. It was found in the "Areni-1" cave located in the Vayots Dzor province of Armenia. According to Wikipedia, the shoe was discovered by Diana Zardaryan, an Armenian post-graduate student, in the course of excavations by a team of archeologists of Armenia’s Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography as well as from Ireland and the United States.

The team's findings were published on June 9, 2010 in the journal PLoS ONE. Interestingly, this is an open access online scientific journal. See their article "First Direct Evidence of Chalcolithic Footwear from the Near Eastern Highlands" here

Plos ONE Output
In 2006 the journal was launched in beta version and published 138 articles; in 2007 it published just over 1,200 articles; and in 2008 it published almost 2,800 articles, making it the largest open access journal in the world. This was also the year when the journal started to publish on a daily basis. In 2009, 4,406 articles were published, making PLoS ONE the third largest scientific journal in the world (by volume), tells Wikipedia. See here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLoS_ONE

Interesting! I learned all this navigating from an old shoe rediscovery!