Roman bigfoot? UK archaeologists probe 'unusually large' shoes
The 30cm+ (11.8in) long shoes -- equivalent to size 49 in Europe and size 15 in the US -- have been found by archaeologists from the Vindolanda Charity Trust in recent months.
The trust was established in 1970 to excavate, conserve, and share Roman remains at Vindolanda and Carvoran, both part of the Hadrian's Wall World Heritage Site in northern England.
The eight large shoes were discovered in a defensive ditch, often used by Romans as a rubbish dump, at the Magna Roman Fort in Northumberland.
Only a tiny fraction of shoes in Vindolanda's vast existing collection are of a similar size, whereas around a quarter of those from the Magna site are in this size range, according to Rachel Frame, a senior archeologist on the project.
She called it "really unusual".
"We're all now off trying to work out who might have been here," Frame told AFP.
She added they were eager to know "which regiments would have been stationed in Magda" and why exactly there are "so many large shoes at this site compared to others".
The team reported finding the first "exceptionally large shoe" on May 21 and has continued to discover more since then, according to Vindolanda's website.
"You need specific soil conditions with very low oxygen for organic objects made of things like wood, leather, textiles, stuff like that, to survive for this length of time," explained Frame.
She noted the team are probing the history of the Roman Empire for answers, stressing people of different cultures and backgrounds would likely have been meeting at the site.
"When people think about the Romans, they think about Italians, they sometimes forget just how broad the Empire was and how far it stretched," Frame said.
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"Massive, stone-faced earthen mounds rise from the plain; nearby are great rectangular platforms and sunken courts with beautiful cut-stone masonry," Denver Art Museum curator Margaret Young-Sánchez wrote in her book "Tiwanaku: Ancestors of the Inca" (University of Nebraska Press, 2004). Researchers aren't sure when Tiwanaku was first settled, but Young-Sánchez noted in her book that people in the Lake Titicaca area started settling permanently around 4,000 years ago. By this time, llamas (used as pack animals), alpacas (prized for their fur) and other camelids had been domesticated. In addition "farmers learned to cultivate hardy, frost-resistant crops like tubers and quinoa, watered by natural rainfall and water channeled from the mountain slopes," Young-Sánchez wrote. A millennium later, these adaptations had been enhanced by "raised-field agriculture" — a technique that "involves creating artificially raised planting mounds separated by canals of water," Young-Sánchez wrote. 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Hunter-gatherers such as Neanderthals, with average body weights between 50 kilograms and 80 kilograms (110 pounds and 175 pounds), would have had to keep their consumption of dietary protein below 300 grams (about 10 ounces) per day to avoid the condition. That amounts to around 1,200 calories — a level of intake far short of daily energy needs, according to the research. As a result, the Neanderthals likely needed to source the remaining calories from a nonprotein source, either fat or carbohydrate. Cuts of meat from animal muscle contain very little fat, making bones — which contain marrow and other fatty tissue even when an animal is malnourished — a more important resource. The researchers discovered that the overwhelming majority of remains at the site came from 172 individual large animals, including horses, deer and aurochs, large cow-like creatures that are now extinct. Neanderthals had selected the longest bones that would have contained the most marrow, the study found. 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The findings are 'exciting,' according to Ludovic Slimak, an archaeologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France. Slimak wasn't involved in the study. 'They finally offer clear archaeological confirmation of what many of us had long suspected: that Neanderthals not only valued within-bone lipids but developed specific strategies to extract and process them,' said Slimak, who is the author of the 'The Last Neanderthal,' which will be published in English later this year. 'This aligns closely with the broader archaeological record, which shows Neanderthals as highly skilled big-game hunters with a refined sense of ecological adaptation,' he added. The Neumark-Nord site is 'the best example yet of bone-grease rendering,' from this period of the Stone Age, said Bruce Hardy, the J. Kenneth Smail Professor of Anthropology at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Hardy also was not involved in the research. 'The combination of evidence presented here at Neumark-Nord is impressive,' Hardy said. 'It may well represent the smoldering gun, or simmering bone broth, of Neanderthal bone-grease rendering.'
