SHOE BUSINESS: MARILYN PENN
After consulting with Google, I discovered some interesting things. The oldest known garment is a 5,000 year old linen shirt with pleated sleeves, found in an Egyptian tomb. This predates permanent pleating by five millenia and boggles the mind to think of who pressed those pleats and how. 400 mummies, estimated at 1500 – 4000 years old were found in western China, north of Tibet, dressed in extravagant clothes including tartan twill pants and deerskin boots. Their graves contained furs, feathered hats and additional clothing including the oldest sample of cashmere. Who were these fashion forward people? They were tall blond caucasians like Claudia Schiffer or Brad Pitt. One theory holds that they may have migrated from the Caucasus, home of the earliest appearance of plaid, about 5,000 years ago. One group of them headed west to become the Celts and another may have headed east into China to become that region’s fashionistas. I wonder if they may have been people who had traveled the Silk Road and wandered way off course, deciding to settle in China where they’d stand out more than in Milan or Miami.
I learned about the Kiffian whose graveyard was discovered in Niger’s Tenere desert and who lived between 10,000 – 8,000 years ago. Some were taller than six feet (women and men) and one man had ridges on his thigh bone, a sign of powerful leg muscles while another from a different group (the Tenerians) had none. This confirmed my hunch that even then the world was divided between studly Schwarzeneggers and 90 lb. weaklings who got sand kicked in their faces, except that in those days, the Sahara was verdantly green.
On our own continent, a skeleton of a white European man was found in the state of Washington. Known as Kennewick Man, he was first thought to have been a pioneer but radiocarbon dating established that he was more than 9,000 years old. This supports a politically incorrect theory that far from stealing this land from Indians, white Europeans migrated via a land bridge in the Bering Sea about 12,000 years ago, creating their own indigenous settlements. The Indians have taken possession of Kennewick Man to prevent further testing and possible disturbance to their national narrative and license to operate casinos.
I learned that there is a scientific study of human growth known as auxology and that the Dutch are the tallest Europeans. Today’s Europeans and Americans are much taller than their forbears of two centuries ago, mainly due to better nutrition and improved health. Did you know that we are growing downward? The increase in our height is manifested in longer legs, not in longer trunks. And legs bring me back to shoes, the subject that first piqued my curiosity about the height of homo sapiens and the size of their shoes. I’m still betting that the Armenian shoe did not belong to a woman, but if it turns out that it did, I’m convinced that she was humanity’s first known female sasquatch, also known as Bigfoot.
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