Divers have made an extraordinary discovery during excavations at a lake near Zurich. They found a shoe dating back to the Neolithic age of around 3300-2800 B.C.

The shoe was found almost fully preserved in the Greifensee lake at Maur, theSwiss News Agency SDA-ATS reported on Tuesday. Less than ten of these rare specimens have been found in Europe to date.

The Stone-age lake-dwellings sites on the shores of lakes in the Zurich area are considered to be some of the most important archaeological sites in Europe.

The shoe dates back 5,000 years to the so-called “Horgen” culture, according to the Zurich building authorities in a statement on Tuesday.

The shoe is a “prime example of the ingenious manufacturing of Neolithic clothing”, says the statement. It is made out of bast, a material made from certain types of tree bark that is rarely used today.

The recovery and subsequent conservation of the fragile find was a very lengthy and complicated process, say the building authorities. The pristine appearance of the shoe was highly unusual.

“It’s a miracle that a textile object so ancient remained unaffected by natural decomposition and could be preserved in such good condition”, they stated.