The world's oldest known jeans have sold for $114,000.
The world's oldest known jeans have sold at auction
The work pants were discovered in a sunken trunk in a shipwreck in 1857 near the coast of North Carolina.
The jeans feature a five-button fly and are thought to have belonged to a miner.
The garments were among 270 items of Gold Rush-era memorabilia that sold for almost a total of $1 million at auction, according to Holabird Western Americana Collections.
The auction was held in Reno, Nevada and online earlier this month.
Auction officials say that the five-button fly indicates that the jeans could be an early manufacture of work pants sold by Levi Strauss - who made the first pair of blue jeans in San Francisco in 1873.
Dwight Manley, the managing partner of artefact owners the California Gold Marketing Group,said: "Those miner's jeans are like the first flag on the moon, a historic moment in history.
"There are no earlier five-button fly jeans in existence."