This post is about the width of feet or EE/ EEE on shoe sizes.
Going by shoe sales, it seems like the median human feet width is D and not the wide sizes.
Would physics prefer humans to have wider feet to give more traction while running ? is the median shift to a D width more recent evolution or did the oldest homo-sapiens have the same feet width median ?
These footprints from 3.7 million years ago look more or less like modern proportions to me.
Other animals that are good long distance runners, like horses, antelopes and wolves, don’ t have particularly large feet. Traction doesn’t seem to be a major factor in running efficiency.
By humans you seem to mean men. Or do you think that women often have size EEE feet?
The US foot shoe widths (like EEE) are not an absolute measure (like the size 9) is, rather they are relative to the size. So a 9 EEE is wider than an 8 EEE which is wider than a 7 EEE. I don’t know if women’s shoes widths are stated in the same way, but if they are, there’s no reason a woman (or a smaller man) wouldn’t be just as likely to have a EEE just because they are smaller.
Width does necessarily not provide traction per se, it can actually cause loss of it.
It does lower ground pressure though.
I would imagine you optimally only want enough width to support the weight and not sink into the ground too easy?
On a hard, dry surface, the total amount of traction will be more or less independent of the area of the foot. I suppose that wider feet might help with lateral balance, but leg positioning will make a much larger difference there.
The answer might depend on how you envision wider feet helping with running… to run faster? To be able to run longer distances? What kind of environments/terrain?
But I think the answer would likely be “no” in any case. A quick bit of quick googling hints that smaller feet might give a tiny edge for a sprinter, and that tendon and toe bone lengths might also play a part in speed, but overall that muscles, training, and conditioning have a far greater impact on how well we run.
Also, humans have never really relied on running prey animals down in a speed-sense where maximum or ideal traction is favored; rather we use running to out-distance prey animals, almost all of which are faster sprinters than us. We just keep on chugging after them while they bolt then rest, bolt then rest. Eventually they can’t get a long enough rest, slow down, and we catch up enough to start throwing or jabbing sharp sticks into them. When hunting we rely more on the quantity of steps when running, rather than the quality.
I actually wonder if we’re going backward. I presume humans evolved from creatures with hands for feet (going by your typical monkey or chimp) and slowly lost the need for flexible palms and long gripping toes. The foot size would be related to the original palm size and the need to accommodate 5 toes across. Are hands and feet related? (Tiny hands means… tiny feet?) Perhaps there’s a cross-linked gene in there. Perhaps its developmentally a bit random, like some other body proportions. (My leg to torso size ratio is substantially different from my wife - we’re both about the same height but she has much longer thighs, which she reminds me every time we fly.
It may just be a racial characteristic, but when my father was in the Army in Sierra Leone, they had to have extra large boots made for the native soldiers; most of whom had been barefoot all their lives.
OT: I was equally surprised and delighted to learn from this thread that there actually exist some countries where the fact that all feet are not equiproportional is generally acknowledged. I wonder why continental European shoe-size system designers apparently all are morons? I’ve mostly had to get ridiculously long shoes to accommodate the width of my feet. Guess I’ll be ordering them from the US or UK in the future!
Well, the sizes exist, but good luck finding them. My feet are wide for their length, too. K-Mart used to have shoes one step wider than normal, but don’t seem to any more. And the last time I went to an actual shoe shop, instead of using actual measurements, they kept asking me “What size do you usually wear?”, and I kept answering “A size that doesn’t fit right”.
In horses, hoof (& leg) size is more related to durability than to speed or traction. Fine legs & small hooves are considered ‘elegant’ by humans, so they breed for that, but the horses end up with leg problems and going lame long before they should.
For a while, Quarter horse breeders (& show judges) were looking for a horse with a massive butt (‘strong hindquarters’) but with fine, elegant legs. This led to Champions who were effectively no good for anything except winning In-Hand classes in the show ring – their undersized legs & hooves meant they went lame if you tried to use them for any functional purpose.
Arabian breeders had a similar bad trend for a while – they too wanted overly-refined legs & feet for the horses’ body. The ‘living statue’ trend. That was ameliorated with rule changes so that an Arabian couldn’t get the highest award (Legion of Merit) unless it also showed in an active performance discipline. [Unfortunately, extreme Arabian breeders have switched to working on the head, with tiny, refined ears and overly dished faces. Even resorting to illegal plastic surgery to achieve this. To the point that some now look almost deformed to me. At least,messing with the head doesn’t caus as much unsoundness as messing with the legs & hooves.]
Is there* some*, although quite possibly overexaggerated, rationale for this trend in breeding? I mean, a smaller hoof should mean less inertia, and thus with a given muscle strength a faster gait, right?
And isn’t it also true that they sometimes add weight to the horses’ hooves (or to some of the hooves) to achieve better balance or whatnot? (I think this is mostly done in harness racing, of which I know precious little).
My own feet change about a half size between winter boots and summer sandals.
I wore the dreaded crocs for a couple of years, ease in chasing after a lil’wrekker, And I came out with wider foot. It has since returned to my normal width with the wearing of cross trainers.
Man-brain no compute. Please provide simple translation! 
As I understood it, we’ve bred horses up from the ponies they used to be to something more massive. As a result, we have the same situation we have with basketball players - too oversized and thin for the original “design” of the body - the proportions to which it evolved - therefore more prone to mechanical failure of the bones and joints with excess activity. Similarly football players are overstressing bones and joints while weighing maybe twice what the human body originally evolved for - hence the frequent structural failures of legs, knees, and ankles.
Like most evolution, the size and variability of feet has been tuned by generations of filtering to be appropriate for the range of support required to accomplish what humans (used to) do. A foot half the area has double the weight per square inch - hence higher risk of ground debris / puncture injury, and that injury being more incapacitating. Ditto for too big an area - more risk of picking up an injury that is infectious. We have Goldilocks feet, the best trade-off.
The decreased weight of a smaller hoof is negligible in the total weight involved.
The over-exaggeration seems to be a human trait – if a little bit is good, a whole lot more is better.
In horse showing, a lot of this happens because the big breeders start emphasizing some trait, and the judges in shows start rewarding that. (And a lot of the big breeders are judges themself.)
Not in racing, where every bit of extra weight is eliminated. Sometimes unbalanced weight is added to correct gait problems. Like a horse with a too narrow gait might have shoes with more weight to one side, to make them step a normal width and prevent interfering. This is called corrective shoeing.
Weight is added in Saddlebred, Hackney, & similar breeds to get emphasized high knee action. That’s supposed to be a natural trait of the breed, but if your horse doesn’t have so much of it bred in, extra weight in the shoes can imitate it.
Except that I fear we have not. Or rather, not anymore. Our feet (and legs, and spine, and all the stuff that comes with it) evolved for millions of years during fairly constant circumstances; but (unless you’re a Khoi-San hunter/gatherer!) those circumstances have, in a few thousand years, been replaced with a totally new environment. Most of us people work for far too much of our time. A lot of us carry much too heavy loads; a few much to little. And we do a lot of repetitive movements far too often. Even walking fast, as we do when trying to catch the bus or get in time for class or a meeting, is quite unnatural – either you should walk slowly, or run. And wearing shoes is absolutely damning – all of us who are used to go barefoot in the summer feel footwear as a burden, thrown upon us by the climate or social convention, and a constant potential stumbling threat. And here I fear we have somewhat come to way’s end, where we have to rely on technology for support. I believe it’s not a coincidence that* hallux valgus* afflicts an actual majority of women in some industrialized countries, while it’s largely unknown in most of the Third World.