It's really windy today guys, we're having some filming technical
difficulties, so I hope you can hear me okay. If the camera moves, we're trying
our best. This shoe is an astonishing 9600 years old maybe even as old as
10,000 400 years so is this one and this one and together between the three of
them they hold the illustrious title of the world's oldest shoe. Yep we're
starting 2019 with a bang with a topic that you've never wondered about but
I'm gonna talk about anyway. All of these shoes came from right here in Central
Oregon and incredibly these are not the only shoes to survive from the
Paleolithic. We actually have a wide range of shoes spanning several thousand
years. It's pretty strange archaeological finds Oh such a broad
selection of shoes. Built out of intertwined cords of sagebrush bark,
which grow everywhere here in Central and Eastern Oregon. We actually know
quite a lot about the people who made them. They lived in a time period called
the Younger Dryas. It was a period of exceptionally sharp climatic change. It
wasn't getting warmer like ours is now, it was getting much colder and drier. The
large pluvial lakes which had dotted the landscape here in oregon during the Ice
Age were drying up and being replaced by marshes and the very large mammals that
we associate with the early Stone Age in America like woolly rhinos camels
saber-toothed Tigers mammoths all of those had gone extinct by this time and
these people lived on a diet that's much more familiar to us now. In the summer
they hunted deer and elk and in the winter they spent their time around the
marshes eating waterfowl and presumably a lot of plant resources but those don't
survive as well in the archaeological record. At the same site that these shoes
were discovered they also found several pits, presumably earthen ovens,
containing the remains of an incredible 14,000 rabbits. However you cut it, that
is a lot of bloody rabbits. Not only was this an important resource for clothing
in this cold climate but the killing of so many animals it must have been a bit
of an occasion for their communities it must have pulled the the wider community
together, much like their Shoshone descendants did in the the 19th century.
The Shoshone Native Americans who live in Oregon Idaho Nevada this sort of area
they also participated in large-scale rabbit hunts and as I said it was a
chance for their community to get together trade, get married, exchange
gossip, probably make a few rabbits of their own if you catch my drift no doubt.
The fact that we see such clear evidence for this kind of activity 10,000 years
ago right up until the 19th century and as well the continued importance of
weaving in these cultures basket, weaving is a very important skill to many Native
American groups here in the the western US, it really shows the great degree
of cultural continuity between Native American groups now and their Stone Age
ancestors and I find that fascinating to be honest. I'm sure I don't know of any
rituals that we do in Britain that we could really show such a clear link to
the Stone Age. I don't know if you can think of one let me know in the comments
down below unless Morris Dancers are from the Stone Age I'm not sure. Whoever
made these shoes at about 9,000 years ago they decided to switch it up they
totally change the way they weaved these shoes and it was a really abrupt change
and and this new style persisted right up until the modern period and it begs
the question what happened 9,000 years ago? Did a new group of people move into the
area with some fancy kicks was there some sort of change in ritual or culture
that meant they weaved things differently or stylistically
had a different concept of weaving? We don't know what do you think?
A lot a lot of archaeologists think there was an invasion or some different
group came into the area but what do you think what would cause such a dramatic
change in the style of shoe? So there you have it talk about starting 2019 with a
bang with a really obscure archaeological topic. I hope you found
that interesting guys tune in in the next two weeks I'm gonna film another
video right now on the Stone Age origins of the spear and I even made a bloody
spear so that's cool. See ya!