How Shoes Change Our Bones, and What That Tells Us About How Our Ancestors Walked

Oct 30: We tend to think of our bones as solid, unchanging support structures inside our bodies, but a recent study from the University of Chicago shows just how much bones can change depending on how we use them.

Using detailed CT scanning, researchers compared ankle bones from modern people who usually wear shoes and those of indigenous people who go barefoot and saw significant differences in their internal structures. The study provides a new way of understanding the evolution of walking in our fossil ancestors by providing reference points for how behaviors shape our skeletons.

“A lot of people think the skeleton is a fixed thing, but it's constantly changing during your life in response to your behavior,” said Zewdi Tsegai, PhD, Assistant Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at UChicago and senior author of the study. “So, we're using this plasticity of the skeleton to try to understand how living people vary and then taking that back to fossils to reconstruct behavior.”

Changes in response to behavior

Hannah Farrell, a PhD graduate and former postdoc at UChicago who is now on the faculty at the University of North Texas Health, led the study. She and her colleagues focused on trabecular bone, the spongy latticework of tissue inside the ends of bones. Trabecular bone provides structural support and shock absorption while keeping the skeleton lightweight. Importantly for this study, it also changes in response to physical forces from behaviors like walking, running, jumping, or climbing to realign its internal struts and offer more support.

“You can think of it like the Eiffel Tower, where it has all these struts and lattices to provide a very rigid structure,” Farrell said. “But the trabeculae are also preferentially reoriented throughout life to continue to provide that same support as the individual faces loading from different behaviors.”

Farrell and her teammates used high-resolution micro-CT scanning to analyze ankle bones from collections of skeletons. The first group consisted of 40 individuals from modern, post-industrial people who regularly wore shoes. A second group included 13 skeletons of habitually unshod barefoot indigenous people from the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, two individuals from southern Africa and one individual from Central Africa, provided by the Natural History Museum in London.

The researchers focused on the talus bone—a central, weight-bearing bone in the ankle that connects the lower leg to the foot. The modern, shod individuals had more trabecular bone in the back of the talus, suggesting that people wearing shoes tend to put more weight on the back of this bone, perhaps from the higher angle of the heel created by shoes. Modern shoe-wearers also had more trabecular bone on the inside of the talus toward the big toe, hinting at how shoes redistribute weight.

In contrast, the indigenous, unshod individuals had more trabecular bone at the front of the talus, indicating more weight being put on the bone from flexing forward, perhaps from climbing or squatting.

“We are seeing quite clear distinctions in the internal bone structure, which was a very nice surprise for me,” Farrell said. “What has been really cool is that our results are mirrored in real-life anatomical studies that people are doing with modern humans, which makes our results a little bit stronger as well.”

Making the right comparison

Both researchers say that understanding the changes in bone structure generated by wearing shoes (or not) provides a better reference point for studying fossils of our human ancestors. This can provide insight into how those ancestors walked and how much time they spent engaging in other behaviors, such as climbing.

“Quite often the humans we have access to study are going to be modern, shoe-wearing humans like you and me, and the big question there is: Is that a good comparison for what we expect bipedality to look like in the fossil record?” Farrell said.

“If we can find variation within one modern species, that means that the subtle differences that we might find in fossils are meaningful,” Tsegai continued. “And if we can connect behaviors in living humans with bone structure, then we can look in the past and make inferences about behavior and the evolution of bipedalism.”

The study, “The impact of footwear on human talar trabecular architecture,” was published on Sept. 28, 2026, in the Journal of Anatomy. Additional authors include Andrea Luková from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, and the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czech Republic; Sebastian Bachmann, Alexander Synek, and Dieter H. Pahr from Technische Universität Wien, Austria; and Karley Spriggs from UChicago and the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.