A 2026 study found differences in the internal structure of the talus—the bone connecting the leg and foot—between sampled adults who habitually wore shoes and people who habitually went unshod. The results suggest footwear may be one influence on how ankle bones adapt to loading, but the observational comparison cannot show that shoes alone caused the differences or that they are harmful.
What the study compared
In “The impact of footwear on human talar trabecular architecture,” published in Journal of Anatomy on 8 September 2026, Farrell and colleagues analyzed high-resolution micro-CT scans of tali from 40 habitually shod adults in US donation-based skeletal collections and 16 habitually unshod individuals: 13 Andaman Islanders, two Khoisan people and one Aka individual. The study
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The talus is the ankle bone that connects the leg and foot. Inside it is trabecular bone, a lattice-like structure that remodels in response to mechanical loading. The researchers examined bone volume fraction (BV/TV), its distribution across the bone, trabecular thickness, separation and number, and degree of anisotropy (DA), a measure of how directionally organized the internal structure is.
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1Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors2Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute3Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsThis was a cross-sectional comparison between groups drawn from different populations and contexts, not an experiment in which people were assigned different footwear. The study compares habitual footwear groups; it does not compare particular shoe brands or styles.
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What differed in the talus
Average bone volume fraction
The shod group had higher mean whole-talus BV/TV than the unshod group; the reported group comparison had p=0.047. BV/TV describes the proportion of a sampled volume occupied by bone. This statistical difference is not, by itself, evidence of a health advantage or harm.
Regional distribution
The groups also differed in where BV/TV was relatively higher. Shod individuals showed higher values in posteromedial regions of the talus, while unshod individuals showed higher values around the talar head and distal neck. The authors suggest that the unshod pattern could be consistent with loading during postures such as squatting or climbing. That is a possible biomechanical interpretation, not a directly demonstrated cause.
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Directionality
Shod individuals had higher DA overall, meaning their trabeculae were more directionally organized. The authors interpret this as consistent with loading along more constrained directions. They also report greater variation in DA among shod individuals, which they suggest may reflect heterogeneity in footwear types. Neither explanation proves how footwear produced the observed pattern.
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Measures without robust differences
Mean trabecular thickness, separation and number did not show robust group differences in the reported comparisons. The findings therefore do not indicate that every measured feature of the talus differed between groups.
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A variance result sensitive to one specimen
The difference in BV/TV variance reached statistical significance (p=0.033) only after the researchers excluded one unshod outlier. That result depends on the exclusion and should not be treated as an equally stable finding to the basic group comparison.
What the study can—and cannot—say about shoes
The researchers report that BMI explained approximately 27% of variation in whole-bone mean BV/TV within the shod sample. This does not account for the overall difference between the shod and unshod groups, and it does not establish that footwear caused a change.
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Because the comparison is observational, footwear is entangled with other differences between the groups, including body size, activity, terrain, age, subsistence and broader lifestyle. The modest sample also combines unshod individuals from three populations with shod specimens from recent US collections. The study cannot isolate the effect of footwear from these factors or show what happens to one person’s talus after a footwear change.
The paper does not establish whether changing footwear can prevent or reverse the observed differences. Independent replication and longitudinal evidence on individual footwear changes remain unresolved. The results concern the talus; they should not be generalized to other bones, treated as evidence that shoes damage bones, or used to conclude that barefoot footwear is healthier.
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Why the finding matters to fossil research
Researchers use trabecular bone to infer how joints were loaded during life. Comparisons with modern human skeletons can help interpret fossil hominins, but modern skeletal collections often represent postindustrial people whose footwear, activity, health and lifestyles differ from those of past populations.
This study suggests that habitual behavior associated with footwear may be part of the variation within modern comparison samples. Accounting for that variation could help paleoanthropologists interpret talar architecture more carefully. It is a contribution to comparative anatomy and fossil interpretation, not a clinical study or a guide to choosing shoes.
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