pair of men's trousers which auctioneers believe may be the world's oldest pair of jeans has sold for $114,000 (£92,010).
The white pants were found in a sunken trunk in a shipwreck in 1857 off the coast of North Carolina.
They feature a five-button butterfly design and are believed to belong to a miner.
The jeans were among 270 pieces of Gold Rush-era memorabilia that sold for nearly $1m total, according to Holabird Western Americana Collections.
The auction was held in Reno, Nevada in the western United States, and also online, on December 3.
''Those miners' jeans are like the first flag on the moon, a historic moment in history,'' said Dwight Manley, managing partner of California Gold Marketing Group, which owns the artifacts.
"No classic five-button butterfly jeans exist."
The goods came from the SS Central America, also known as the ''golden ship'', a 280-foot (85-meter) ship that brought passengers to and from Central America to the east coast of the United States in the 1850s.
The ship sank during a Category II hurricane in September 1857, killing 425 of the 578 passengers and crew.
The passengers drowned with about 21 tons of gold coins and antiquities.
The shipwreck was first discovered in 1988.
The men's work pants were recovered from the trunk of John Dement, a man from Oregon, who may have bought them in San Francisco, the auction house said.
Auction officials say the five-button fly indicates that the jeans may have been made from work pants sold by Levi Strauss.
Levi Strauss made the first pair of blue jeans in San Francisco in 1873, 16 years after the shipwreck that contained the miner's pants.
But the company's historian and archive director Tracey Panek told the BBC there was "no connection between Levi Strauss & Co and the Reno auction trousers", nor were they "miner work trousers".
The sale comes two months after a pair of vintage Levi's jeans from the 1880s - found in an abandoned mine shaft in the western United States - sold for $76,000 at an auction in New Mexico.
The remains from the shipwreck are scheduled to be auctioned in February 2023
