I’m pretty damned sure of it. Why would they do so otherwise when feet of the habitually-unshod are so perfectly adapted to walking on terrain? It’s not like (like in the case of clothes) they could see animals with warm furry coats and think “I want one of those”. You construct what you want to emulate. In the case of sandals, they wanted to emulate floors, not paws.
While the oldest shoes discovered are 7-8kya, the evolution of foot bone structure points to shoe-wearing as long ago as 40kya [1], predating the Neolithic.
It is very likely that shoes predate floors and were worn for easier travel over rough terrain.
Just FYI to all the shoe fascists, there's a guy Cody Lundin [1] who walks around barefoot all the time, even in freezing temperatures and does quite fine with it. I first found out about him as a survivalist author.
Thanks for the reference and the comment, I really do appreciate it (and I’m not being sarcastic), but evidence of foot structure mutating 40,000 years ago as a conseuqnce of wearing shoes only undermines my theory if floors can be definitively placed later than that. As for the 7,000-8,000 year ago shoes, that’s well within the horizon of architecture, of which the earliest example we are aware of is Gobekli Tepe which is considered to be 13,000 years old.
