It might seem like the sort of thing that humans have used throughout our existence, but historically speaking,

Footwear is a relatively new invention. For hundreds of thousands of years humans spent their entire lives barefoot.

Then someone got the bright idea that it might be a good idea to put something between our feet and the ground,

and from there it was a direct path to Air Jordans, hiking boots, and flip-flops.

Learn more about the development of the shoe and what our feet would look

like if we didn't wear them on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. It goes without saying that our feet are really important.

A full 12.5% of the bones in our body are in our feet.

The fact that humans invented shoes to cover our feet doesn't surprise anyone who has ever walked outside without shoes on.

For most modern humans, walking even short distances on ground that hasn't been manicured can be extremely painful.

So before I get into the discussion of the development of footwear,

I should probably address the question of what our feet were like before shoes.

Most articles of clothing that humans wear do not

fundamentally change our bodies. Shirts, pants, dresses and hats mostly just

sit on or hang off our body. Other than trapping heat or blocking sunlight, they don't have

any real long-term impact. Shoes, however, have fundamentally changed us. A human who has never worn shoes will have feet that look

radically different from a shoe wear. For starters, people who have never worn

shoes have significantly wider feet. They aren't quite like hobbits, but they are noticeably wider.

There is a photo taken from a helicopter in Brazil that's been floating around the internet

of indigenous people in the Amazon.

Despite being taken from the air, the one thing you can tell

from everyone in the photo is how wide their feet are. In the 1940s a

podiatrist by the name of Samuel Schluman studied people in China in India who had never worn shoes.

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