Anatomical evidence for the antiquity of human footwear: Tianyuan and Sunghir
Section snippets
Materials and methods
The comparison of pedal phalangeal robusticity is based on external morphometrics of the available Late Pleistocene late archaic and early modern human phalanges and associated postcrania, divided into three samples: Middle Paleolithic late archaic humans (Neandertals: La Chapelle-aux-Saints, La Ferrassie, Kiik-Koba, Palomas, Regourdou, Shanidar, and Spy; N = 9/7); Middle Paleolithic early modern humans (Qafzeh and Skhul; N = 4/3), and Middle Upper Paleolithic (Gravettian sensu lato: Barma Grande,
Results
As previously noted (Trinkaus, 2005), the three recent human samples follow the predicted pattern. Whether the polar moments of area of the middle phalanges are compared to phalangeal length alone or to phalanx length times body mass (Fig. 2, Fig. 3), the habitually shod Euroamerican sample has the most gracile phalanges, the habitually barefoot Amerindian sample has the most robust phalanges, and the habitually shod but robust Inuit sample has an intermediate distribution. They are highly
Discussion and conclusion
Tianyuan 1 therefore extends back in time during the Late Pleistocene the habitual use of footwear, albeit only for this one individual from mid-latitude eastern Eurasia. Early modern human remains from this time period, Nazlet Khater (Crevecoeur, 2006), Oase (Trinkaus et al., 2003, Rougier et al., 2007), Hofmeyr (Grine et al., 2007), and Niah (Barker et al., 2007), lack pedal phalanges, as do late Neandertals and more recent Early Upper Paleolithic modern humans in western Eurasia. It is
Acknowledgments
The Tianyuan Project is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant 40372015), the President Fund of Chinese Academy of Sciences (grant KL203302), and a Wenner-Gren Foundation fellowship (to H.S.). Collection of the Sunghir data was made possible by T. Balueva. Comparative pedal phalangeal data collection has been supported by NSF, Leakey Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation and Washington University.
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