Summary

Wearing shoes is linked to slight structural changes to the spongy bone of our ankles. This discovery affects our understanding of how human walking evolved, as fossils have often previously been compared to the ankle bones of modern, shoe-wearing people. But studying modern humans who don’t routinely wear shoes offers a “window into the past” as to how our extinct human relatives moved, says Zewdi Tsegai at the University of Chicago.

AI summaries can be wrong sometimes—always verify important details using the source article.