CREDIT: CORINNA PERL-APPL
Nike take note: The shoes of a frozen iceman perform better in certain alpine trek tests than modern hiking boots. A Czech engineer has trail-tested the shoes of Ötzi, the 5000-year-old frozen mummy discovered by hikers in the Alps in 1991. Petr Hlavácek, a professor of shoe technology at Tomas Bata University in Zlin, Czech Republic, recreated Ötzi's shoes, which had bearskin soles, tree-bark netting uppers, and were stuffed with a soft alpen meadow hay. A set of the replicas went on display last week at the German Leather Museum in Offenbach.
In September 2001, several volunteers donned the shoes for a 2-day hike to the Alpine pass where Ötzi was found. The measurements they took along the way showed that insulation coefficient in the replicas was higher than that of modern trekking shoes, Hlavácek says. They didn't keep the hikers' feet dry--stepping in a puddle of melted snow "was a shock." Nonetheless, he says feet quickly warmed in the surrounding hay.
The effort was a side project for Hlavácek, who usually works on designing shoes to ease the pain of diabetic neuropathy. He says there are no direct applications of the Stone Age technology yet, but some of the properties of the hay, which also distributed the pressure that can lead to blisters, could have applications in modern shoes.
