Fascinating story.
One thing that I don't understand though. The theory is they washed up a local river, got embedded in sediment and are only now being released. Given that, I would have thought their condition would be much worse. More likely that they were well-packaged on the wreck and have only just been released ?
Garfield phones are still my favorite: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47732553
That baby bootie is amazing. It's not very different than the ones I put on my kids when they were infants.
I'll give a more gruesome reason.
They were attached to corpses, and the corpses are starting to completely decompose. Now the shoes fall off the feet. It could even be a local disturbance, such as something feeding on the corpses (crabs, etc) after the silt receded.
reported before Christmas by the BBC 1.
My hypothesis, since no-one mentioned it yet: beforeigners.
personaly,having found very old shoes, harness leather, beaded moccasins, and other probable organic artifacts, beach bone anyone? in a variety of useualy anoxic or acidic situations, I can then extrapolate, that these are common things to find if a person takes a moment to examine and confirm that they are historical artifacts, and all in all the top 10 to 100 feet of most of our planet is a good place to look for direct evidence of past human activity, use a microscope and now 100% of the planets surface has an artifact.
How about some local performance that recreated shoes from the Victorian period. That ended up in the ocean?
I am reminded of the many shoes[0] that mysteriously wash up in the Pacific Northwest. At least the ones in the article don’t have feet in them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salish_Sea_human_foot_discover...