Bad shoes, no support,foot got flatter, new shoes fixed it
Thank you for your thouroughful answer to my questions! I may have misunderstood some of the terms (not to mention the translation problem – I mostly rely on Wikipedia/Wiktionary when it comes to terminology! – ) commonly used among horse-people (to which I do not truly belong, although I really like horses and used to ride a bit when I was younger!), but I think I get most of what you say!
Man-brain simplify answer: lack of distorting footwear == no distorted feet (but see last of post #20!)
D being median is a feature of men’s shoes.
Women’s median (what manufacturer’s deem it, anyway) is a B.
Personally, I don’t think this is because women actually have proportionally narrower feet but because fashion/society has decreed that women SHOULD have proportionally smaller feet and convinced them to cram their feet into shoes that are too small/narrow… which is why women are more prone to foot problems than men. It’s not because of physical structure, it’s because they aren’t wearing the right size shoes.
Also, as people age their feet get wider. This is particularly true of women, because pregnancy hormones’s effects on tendons result in the feet becoming wider, but even if a person never gets pregnant, and for men, too, over time the feet get wider.
Personally, when I was a young woman I wore a D. I’m now a EE. Effectively, this means I can’t wear fashionable shoes because they don’t make them that wide for women. I can never buy shoes on sale because most stores don’t even stock my size anymore. I buy shoes off the internet at full price, but at least I get shoes that fit. And my feet are healthier than if I had worn high heels all those years.
I can’t answer the physics question, but I think the move to D width is more a feature of people finally wearing shoes that fit properly more than some evolutionary/biological change.
Yes, developmentally hands and feet are related. Someone more versed in genetics and embryonic development could probably explain it better, but many of the same mechanisms that control the development of hands also control the development of feet. Obviously, the “program” isn’t identical but there is a relationship there.
People with long thin hands will also have long, thin feet. People with short, broad hands will also have short broad feet.
In other words, the feet of the natives weren’t compressed over a lifetime by wearing shoes. A LOT of people wear shoes that are too small and think that’s “normal” where if they didn’t wear shoes their feet would be wider, because that’s the natural width of their foot. See Beckdawrek’s posts.
People feet don’t naturally need support. They need support because what we do to them over a lifetime.
When I bought a pair of shoes that actually had the width shown on them, they were “EEE”. I think that is reasonably common in NZ, that shoes are wider than elsewhere. A pair I bought in UK I had to get a size bigger to get them wide enough for me.
I think it’s because we (NZers) spend so much of our childhood barefooted and that even carries into adulthood. Much more so than UK/Europe/North America.
Humans didn’t evolve to just run fast, or to run only in a straight line. Feet are also adapted to climbing and walking, running down animals that are going to change direction and dodge to get away, plus running away from animals that are running humans down. Since there’s plenty of variation in foot size I’m pretty confident our ancestors wouldn’t have had any significant benefit from being much wider than the range of width we see them in now.