this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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Humans have multiple toes because our ape ancestors used their toes like fingers. Having multiple, separate toes is probably bad for survival unless you're using toes to manipulate tools.
Animals that have distinct toes include apes, geckos, mice, raccoons and similar animals which need them to grip onto surfaces or to manipulate things. There are predators which have separate toes because they're a place to mount claws: eagles, cats, etc. There are animals that have separate toes with webbing between for swimming. But, for a lot of animals, separate toes aren't really useful, so they've evolved away: elephants, rhinos, giraffes, horses, cows, etc.
Yeah, but at least most of those still have multiple toes to spread the weight around. Horses decided to get rid of that completely.
Spreading the weight around using toes doesn't seem to be a useful strategy. It's also not something that humans do. Human toes are not at the weight-bearing part of the foot. And, while I'm sure toes are somewhat involved in agility, having individual toes doesn't seem to be. In fact, if you look at apes like gorillas and chimps, it's pretty clear that our toes have been getting shorter and less important as we've been evolving as upright-walking creatures who don't live in trees. Instead, the sole of the foot, which used to be much more like the palm of a hand, has been getting longer and sturdier.
If you have separate toes, you have multiple fragile things that can break or be torn off. If you have one mega-toe it's going to be sturdy. That's probably why the heaviest animals have the fewest / smallest toes.
As someone who goes barefoot whenever possible, i can tell you that the idea of toes not being particularly useful for agility is very incorrect. If i have to restrict my toes i feel like dogs do when you put booties on their paws, so incredibly clumsy.
The toes play a large part in keeping your balance, making minor corrections to your weight distribution, and especially the big toe is pretty significant when pushing off the ground.
Try walking (or even running) around with your toes lifted off the ground, it's very awkward.
The problem is that a lot of people these days are constantly wearing shoes that make their toes useless, and even when not wearing such shoes their toes have been squeezed into a pointy shape (bunions are almost entirely caused by this) and become weak from atrophy. A healthy foot has toes splayed quite wide and the toes will be pretty strong and probably a lot thicker than you're used to, look at baby feet for a rough example.
I mostly go barefoot too, and the shoes I have are "barefoot shoes" that have extremely thin soles. But, I still don't think the individual toes are that important to grip. Sure, the toe pads are important. If you're moving on the balls of your feet, I'd guess maybe 30% of your weight is in your toes. But, I don't think I'm getting much contribution to agility from my baby toe being splayed out. If I glued my toes together, I think it wouldn't hurt my agility much, and it would mean I'm much less likely to catch that individual, fragile baby toe on a corner.
Tbh if I could I think I would turn on the gene for prehensile feet.
Just to try. Looks fun.
you can train your feet to be pretty prehensile, there are people who paint and write with their feet.
Oh yeah I pick up stuff with them sometimes but I wanna try the monkey experience lol