An international team from UCLA have unearthed a perfectly preserved, 5,500-year-old shoe in a cave in Armenia.
The shoe was made to an American Women’s size 7 from a single piece of cowhide and was found stuffed with grass; the shoelaces were also well preserved
Other objects found in the cave included containers of wheat, barley and apricots. The cave’s stable, cool and dry conditions are credited with the exceptional condition as well as the fact that the floor of the cave was covered by a thick layer of sheep dung.
It has already been remarked that the shoe bears a close resemblance to shoes found preserved in northern European bogs as well as traditional Scottish/Irish footware called ghillies, rivlins, cuarans, or pampooties.
Armenia, and the area between the Caspian and the Black sea has been suggested for the homeland of the ancient Indo-Europeans*, who migrated east to the Punjab and Iran and west, as proto gaels, italics and Germanic speaking people.
An interesting comparison has also been made to the shoes found with the 
Iceman (Őtzi) on the italian alps in 1991. They were also lined with hay, made with bear skin but had leather straps, a seperate laced on, deerskin upper cover and an internal net of rough string.†
The iceman find has been dated to a couple of hundred years after the Armenian find and may represent the first stages of Italian leadership in shoe fashion.
Found at: http://today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/2-world-s-oldest-shoe-160052.aspx
* In Search of the Indo-Europeans JP Mallory. Pub. Thames & Hudson 1991.
