Man pays N50m to buy world’s oldest known jeans found 165 years ago in a shipwreck

A pair of men's work pants said to be the world's oldest pair of jeans has sold at auction for $114,000 (N50.7 million).

BBC reports that the white trousers were pulled from a sunken trunk at an 1857 shipwreck off the coast of North Carolina.

The five-button fly was among 270 Gold Rush-era artifacts that sold for a total of nearly $1 million.

The auction took place in Reno, Nevada in the western US, as well as online, on 3 December.

Speaking on the successful sale Dwight Manley, the managing partner of 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."

The ship sank in September 1857 during a Category 2 hurricane, killing 425 of the 578 passengers and crew members. Passengers were carrying an estimated 21 tonnes of gold coins and artifacts when the ship sunk. The wreckage was discovered for the first time in 1988.

A man from Oregon, who may have purchased them in San Francisco, the auction company said.

Auction officials say the five-button fly strongly suggests the jeans could be an early manufacture of work pants sold by Levi Strauss, in the 17th century, the Guardian reports.