Before Shoes: How Humans Were Built to Walk Barefoot

SPEAKER_00 0:00 About two years ago, I got wind of barefoot shoes. And about half a year later, I bought my first pair. Perhaps I fell into the influencer trap or the flashy marketing, but something about it made a lot of sense to me. We spent most of our evolutionary history barefoot, no shoes at all. And yet these days we squish our feet into tight little boxes with narrow ends that force our toes together. And I say this as a man who used to wear winkle pickers. So to me it was like, yeah, of course it makes sense to have a shoe with a wider toe box, thinner sole, more room to breathe, and more foot-shaped. And then it got me wondering, how did we get here? How long have we been wearing shoes for? And how have cushioned shoes changed our posture, our speed, our health? And indeed, what did the earliest forms of shoes look like? I'm Ollie, and this is what we did before. Welcome back. These days it would be hard to imagine going without shoes. There are lots of things that could go wrong. For instance, we have tarmaced and paved most of the places that we like to walk these days, so that wouldn't be super comfortable. And worse still, there could be nails, syringes, broken glass, gravel, anything on the floor that might cause pain. Removing your shoes and being completely barefoot is simply in the modern world not safe. Then you've got the issue of things like dog poo, uh viruses that cause athletes' foot and veruokas, all sorts of problems. Although being barefoot might not be as unhygienic as you might think. More on that a little later. So if this is all true, how did our early ancestors get by without shoes? We might not have invented glass by that point, so we didn't have that as a threat, but we did have thorns, stones, uh heat, ice, even insects, and a lot more besides. I once stepped on a dead bee, and that was bad enough. So were our feet just tougher back in the day? Well, in 300,000 years, our feet haven't actually changed that much, but the way we use them has. For prehistoric humans who ran, climbed, and hunted every day, the soles of their feet developed thick, flexible calluses, layers of keratinized skin that protected against the rough ground. Unlike the hard, dry calluses that you might be used to that we get from shoes or from friction, um where it's sort of like a buildup of dead skin, the calluses that these ancient people would have had were more smooth, dense, and springy. And you know when you get a callus, you sort of lose sensation in that location? Well, a 2019 Harvard study on modern day barefoot communities found that their calluses were as thick as the soles of a shoe, but they didn't blunt that tactile feedback, so they maintained the sensitivity while also adding that layer of protection. And that means they could feel the ground, which is important for balance and movement, but they barely noticed sharp objects like stones or maybe hot sand. And thanks to the constant use of their feet, they developed stronger muscles and tendons. You see, our feet are actually incredible, uh, if we let them be. Each one has 26 bones, 33 joints, and over a hundred muscles, tendons, and ligaments, all designed to flex, grip, and absorb shock. And for these ancient humans, their feet developed in different ways depending on the environment, so they adapted. In hot, arid regions, thick calluses and widened feet helped disperse heat and pressure, whereas perhaps in forested or wet regions, the soles stayed slightly softer but more grippy. So after a very long 250,000 years of not wearing any shoes at all, things started to change. Around 40,000 years ago, ancient skeletal remains show changes in our toe bones, suggesting we may have begun using soft animal hides to cover our feet. The world was freezing, we began pushing into Ice Age Europe and Siberia, environments where winter temperatures could plunge below minus 20 degrees Celsius. So barefoot hunting on frozen ground could mean frostbite or death. Softened with fat and smoke, scraped thin with stone tools, and tied around the foot with sinew, these animal hide shoes were simple but game-changing. I guess you could say they were more like leather socks stuffed with grass or fur for insulation. The hides most likely came from animals people were already hunting for food and warmth, so things like reindeer, bison, deer, horse, and later mammoth. These hide shoes let humans chase their prey across snow, migrate through ice-bitten valleys, and push into new continents. Although we haven't got any physical evidence of these, there are signs, like the skeletal changes to the toe that I mentioned, but we've also found ancient tools that would have been used for things like leatherworking, such as bone awes and needles with drilled eyes at sites like Dolny Vestonich in the Czech Republic and Kostenki in Russia, dating to around 30,000 to 50,000 years ago, and we found scrapers and burins used to thin and smooth hides. But if you want something a bit more akin to a proper shoe, then evidence of the earliest shoes comes from around 10,000 years ago, during the late Stone Age. Archaeologists uncovered these ancient sandals in Oregon, known as Fort Rock sandals, after the cave that they were found in. They are incredibly distinctive fibre footwear woven from sagebrush bark with a flat sole and a toe flap covering the top of the foot. They were found beneath a layer of volcanic ash which came from the eruption of Mount Mizama around 7600 BC. Of course, these weren't cushioned, they were a sort of fragile foot cover for rocky terrain. Over time, these soft hide wrappings evolved from simple protection against the cold into purpose-built shoes for different landscapes. I mentioned him in my previous episode about clothes, but the famous Ertzy the Iceman who was found frozen in the Alps, so he's about 5,300-year-old mummy, he wore shoes made of bear skin soles, deerskin uppers, and woven grass insulation. They would have been waterproof, breathable, and designed for alpine snow, so basically the world's first hiking boots. And across the world, different peoples developed shoes independently of one another as they adapted to their environment. So in Japan, you saw these woven straw sandals called waraji. In Egypt, there were papyrus sandals for the hot desert, and in the Arctic they had sealskin boots called kamiks that stayed flexible in the freezing cold. Then something shifted. Shoes stopped being just for protection and started meaning something more. Leave it to humans to turn something very useful into a status symbol. In ancient Egypt, only the wealthy wore shoes indoors. Slaves went barefoot. In Rome, sandals became a symbol of class, senators wore red straps, and commoners wore brown. And in Greece it was the same pattern. Citizens and soldiers had sandals or boots, enslaved people and rural workers did not. In art, bare feet were often a sign of poverty or humility. By the Middle Ages, shoes became a statement of vanity and hierarchy. Leather was expensive and shoes were handmade, which was a labour-intensive craft. Many peasants often went barefoot or used makeshift footwear like wooden clogs or rags. And even into the 14th and 15th centuries, many rural Europeans worked and lived barefoot, especially in the summer. Pointed shoes called poolanes were introduced from Poland during the reign of Richard II in England. Now these had incredibly obscenely long toes. Think winkle pickers on steroids. For the extra vein, the wealthy elite, some made the pointed toes so long that they had to stuff them and fasten them to their knees with gold or silver chains to stop them from tripping, which is absolutely ridiculous, but apparently back then it was fashionable. That being said, most poolanes were not quite so long, just moderately so, but still ridiculous. Now we have high heels and limited edition trainers. Oh how far we've come. Once we hit the Industrial Revolution in 1760, machines took over and shoes changed a lot. A pair of leather shoes went from costing a week or more of a labourer's wage down to a fraction of that. Plus, mass production meant shoes could be finally made in identical pairs, something that didn't really exist before, though I wonder if that is better or not. Because most people don't have identically sized feet. A 2018 study published in the Journal of Foot and Ankle Research measured over 1,000 adults and found that over 70% had measurable asymmetry between their left and right feet, so they different sizes. Maybe we're losing out by not having uh bespoke-made shoes, perhaps. Either way, they certainly became more available thanks to the Industrial Revolution, so that's probably still a win. By the early 1800s, shoes still had leather soles, they were stiff, slippery, and quick to rot in the rain. Then in 1839, an American inventor called Charles Goodyear made a discovery. He accidentally dropped a mix of rubber and sulfur onto a hot stove and found that it didn't melt. Instead, it hardened into something flexible, waterproof, and tough. And that process, called vulcanization, turned rubber from a useless gum into a miracle material. By the 1850s, the first rubber-sole shoes, or plym soles, appeared. They gripped the ground, they stayed dry, and they lasted for years. For the first time in history, ordinary people could afford shoes that were practical, durable, and even comfortable. But even after the Industrial Revolution, there were still many communities that remained barefoot. Even as late as the early 20th century, it was still common among poor children in rural Europe and America, and in many parts of Africa, South Asia and the Pacific, going barefoot remained the norm until the mid-20th century, when mass production and Western fashion spread globally. And there are even some photographs from Ireland, Italy, and the southern US that show barefoot kids well into the 1930s and 40s. Even today, some indigenous groups maintain barefoot traditions. But that's not about poverty, more so cultural continuity or comfort. Then came trainers, or sneakers, starting with Converse in 1917. Then uh Adidas came in 1940s and Nike in the 70s. Footwear went from functional to cultural, part of identity, sport, or even rebellion. But something else changed too: the shape and the strength of our feet. Modern shoes are heavily cushioned, stiff and narrow. They do a very good job of protecting us, but they also weaken our natural foot muscles, they flatten our arches and they change the way that we walk. You know what bunions are? When a person's toes have been squashed so much by shoes that they start to look and become a bit deformed. I've seen pictures where this can get really bad. Well that's what the modern shoe can do to us. Studies have shown that people who grow up barefoot have wider feet, stronger toes, and less risk of bunions and foot pain. So in a strange way, the technology designed to help us move might actually be holding us back. For another project, I actually spoke to Stephen Sashin, he's the founder of Barefoot Shoes Brand Zero, and he said this.

SPEAKER_01 12:37 So if you have a shoe that doesn't move, that doesn't let your foot move, there's a quarter of the bones and joints of your whole body and your feet and ankles. If you make bones not move, all the tissue around them, muscles, ligaments, and tendons, gets weaker. So if your shoe doesn't flex properly to let your foot bend and flex and move, it's gonna get weaker.

SPEAKER_00 12:54 Not a good sign. And that's why recently there's been a quiet revolution, the barefoot running movement, popularized by books like Born to Run, which argue that modern shoes have disconnected us from our natural environment. Minimalist shoes with thin, flexible soles tried to replicate what our ancestors had all along. Strength, balance, and a connection to the ground. It's a return, in a sense, to what we did before. And what we don't realize is how much feedback we get, or used to get, from feeling the ground under our feet. When we walk barefoot, thousands of nerve endings in the soles of our feet uh send signals to the brain. Every step is a stream of information and texture, balance and pressure. It's how our nervous system learns to move gracefully through the world. But we have cut that connection off with cushioned shoes.

SPEAKER_01 13:46 Some people, their brain map has so de differentiated. In other words, if they haven't been giving their brain stimulation from the soles of their feet, that part of their brain that would receive that stimulation is going, Oh, you're not gonna give me the info? I'll stop paying attention because why waste the energy? Research from Dr. Um Kirk Erickson showed that elderly people who walk more retained more gray matter in their brain. I said, Why do you think that is? He goes, the stimulation from walking and being and the surroundings. I said, Imagine what it would have been like if they were barefoot or in a minimalist shoe. He goes, Oh, yeah, that would have been really interesting.

SPEAKER_00 14:19 So what happens if you bring barefoot movement back into your life?

SPEAKER_01 14:23 A friend of mine said, When I walk in your shoes, it's like m instant moving meditation.

SPEAKER_00 14:30 But there's also something philosophical about it too. Shoes have always told a story of survival, class, industry, identity, and in a world where we feel and are demonstrably disconnected from nature, barefoot shoes seem to tell a story about reconnection to the natural world. So I said at the beginning that I would come back to the hygiene of going barefoot. So is it really disgusting when people have their hairy toes on display in public places? Well, it depends. Studies of people who habitually go barefoot in Africa, Asia, and among barefoot-running communities, they show no higher general infection rates than shoe wearers, unless they have poor sanitation and cleanliness anyway. Most foot hygiene issues come from moisture trapped inside of shoes, not from exposure. Fungal infections, for example, love the warm, sweaty environment inside of trainers. Paradoxically, uh barefoot feet can actually be healthier in that regard. Drier, they're better ventilated, fewer fungal problems, as long as the surface that you're walking on isn't contaminated. So obviously you don't want to be barefoot in a hospital for good reason, or generally in damp indoor spaces with heavy foot traffic. But if you're outdoors on natural ground, then it's probably fine and healthy and safe. Just make sure that you wash your feet, um, soap and water is enough to do that, and check for cuts or splinters and clean them really quickly, as quickly as you can. And don't go barefoot in communal showers or gym changing rooms. Or also keep your toenails trimmed and your feet moisturized if you can. Cracked heels actually increase infection risk. So, what did we do before shoes? We walked barefoot across continents, felt the earth beneath us, and evolved every bone, muscle, and nerve in our feet to move perfectly without help. Shoes made us more adaptable, but they also made us forget how extraordinary our bodies already were. So maybe getting sucked into the barefoot shoes movement wasn't such a bad thing after all. I have actually managed to get rid of the knee pain that plagued me for years, and my toes have an amazing new ability to spread extremely wide, although it kind of freaks my wife out a little bit. So remember, the next time you kick off your shoes after a long day, you're not just relaxing, you're connecting with the way humans walked for millions of years. I'm Ollie, and this is what we did before. Let me know what you think of the video in the comments, and if you enjoyed it, please support the channel by liking and subscribing. I'll see you next time.