Why Did Humans Start Wearing Shoes?

You are walking a dry riverbed in northern Spain. It is just above freezing, you have nine kilometres to go, and you step on a flint chip lying edge up. For a modern person that is an evening with tweezers. For you it starts a countdown. Nobody has ever found a shoe older than 5,500 years. Shoes are far older than that, and we know it from toe bones. Bare feet handle more than you would think. A 2019 study of 81 Daasanach people in Kenya found their sole calluses were about thirty percent thicker than ours, with no loss of sensitivity at all. Abrasion was never the problem. Cold, deep punctures and parasites were. So Erik Trinkaus went looking for the moment humans solved it, and he found it written into the small bones of the toes.