why can’t we have cool grippy toes like chimpanzees?

Hey guys Julia here for Dnews. This little piggie went to market and this little piggie

is...well, it makes no sense. It looks like nothing else in the animal kingdom. Seriously.

have you ever just looked at your toes and thought why? Well, Hallo Pjotter asked us

how our toes evolved. And that’s a good question.

Toes likely evolved from the same bones that became fins, wings, or hooves in other species.

The dominating scientific theories are that fingers and toes are exclusive features of

tetrapods, or vertebrates with limbs. But according to one study, toes may have evolved

even before fish left the ocean. The study, published in the journal Nature, found 385

million years ago, a fish named Panderichthys, had homologous bones to our fingers and toes.

Either way, phalanges are over hundreds of millions of years old.

Human toes, specifically, are a little newer to the scene. Of all the other living primates,

we’re the only ones that exclusively walk upright on two legs. Other primates, like

chimps, have little grippy feet and ours are just kind of weird looking in comparison,

but research shows they used to be grippy back in the day. According to a study published

in the journal Foot and Ankle International, our ancestors Australopithecus afarensis,

which lived 3.5 million ago years ago, had feet that looked remarkably like a chimpanzee’s!

Fast-forward to homo habilis an ancestor who lived 1.76 million years ago. And her feet

looked a lot like ours do now. We traded in our opposable toe for shorter toes overall,

and gained an arch in our foot. What happened in that interim? Well in short, our ancestors

came down from the trees and started walking on land. As our foot evolved to support walking

on the ground, we started moving faster and faster, eventually learning to run. These

changes forced our feet to evolve to deal with both balance and propulsion in a highly

efficient way. Basically, our feet became more springy and shock-absorbent.

And there's a study to back this up in the Journal of Experimental Biology, showing basically,

these toes are made for running. The researchers created models which showed that longer-toed

individuals do more mechanical work to stabilize their joints and ligaments. This means they

use more energy to run the same distance as shorter-toed people.

This supports what’s called the “endurance running hypothesis” or the idea that our

ancestors were really good at running long distances in order to chase down and wear

out prey. In this kind of hunting style, those with long toes are evolutionarily selected

against because it takes them more work to do run down the same prey. The researchers

also found shorter toes might reduce the risk of injury meaning, long-toed people would

expend more energy to run the same distance, AND run a higher risk of injury while doing

it!

So, our toes, while short and stubby, maybe have evolved to help us run, keep our balance,

and absorb impact. So, the next time you go for a jog thank your toes, even though they

can’t help you climb trees anymore.

The weird thing though I keep hearing about toes, is that our pinky toe is going away,

that we’re evolving out of it. It’s just a useless vestigial structure. But that’s

more old wives tale than anything else. As for one of our other useless lumps left over

from evolution: the appendix, it might not be so useless after all, Tara has the whole

story, right here.