Despite their flimsy leather soles, the shoes offer a good grip and superb shock absorption, and don't create blisters, Hlavacek said.
It's like going barefoot, ''only better," he said. ''In the Oetzi shoes, you feel something like freedom, flexibility."
Scientists have already learned much from the hunter nicknamed Oetzi (rhymes with curtsey): His last meal included venison, he was killed by an arrow, and he probably spent most of his life within about 50 miles of where his body was found.
After studying the original shoes at the museum in Mainz, Germany, Hlavacek set out with his colleagues to duplicate them.
Vaclav Gresak, a university lecturer and saddler who describes himself as the hands and Hlavacek as the brain, described the challenge in an interview in his university workshop.
First they had to figure out how to make the string for the net that kept the hay in place. Eventually, Gresak happened upon an old man who remembered how to make it from thin strips of inner bark.
After they found the right three leathers -- calf, deer, and bear --then the team had to find a tanning method available to Oetzi. Having read an ancient American Indian recipe for tanning, Gresak boiled chopped pig liver and added raw pig's brain. ''It smelled very bad, and there were a lot of flies," Gresak recalled. But it worked.
Then came measuring Oetzi's feet. After two years of bureaucratic wrangling, Hlavacek received permission for 20 minutes of what he describes as ''very hard work."
The next challenge was finding hay suitable for the lining. Eventually the researchers found a grass that was long, soft, and resilient. It was perfect for Oetzi shoes. Hlavacek and his team made three pairs of replicas, and several bigger pairs to fit the researchers. Now it was 2001 and time for a field test, a two-day hike in Alpine terrain near the Italy-Austria border where Oetzi was found.
Conditions weren't ideal. There was snow and temperatures were freezing, but Vaclav Patek, a Czech mountaineer who took part in the hike, recalled in a telephone interview that the shoes ''were a pleasant surprise."
Patek, who owns a firm that makes mountaineering shoes for extreme terrain, has climbed all of Europe's tallest mountains. ''I dare say I would manage to climb them all in the Oetzi shoes," he said.
