Shoes bad, feet good.

It took four million years to evolve the perfect human foot. And we've gone and thrown it all away!! (New York Magazine, "You Walk Wrong")

“Natural gait is biomechanically impossible for any shoe-wearing person,” wrote Dr. William A. Rossi in a 1999 article in Podiatry Management. “It took 4 million years to develop our unique human foot and our consequent distinctive form of gait, a remarkable feat of bioengineering. Yet, in only a few thousand years, and with one carelessly designed instrument, our shoes, we have warped the pure anatomical form of human gait, obstructing its engineering efficiency, afflicting it with strains and stresses and denying it its natural grace of form and ease of movement head to foot.” In other words: Feet good. Shoes bad.

In other evolution news, some interesting new evidence of divergence in human gene pool -- before it then re-merged. BBC: "Human line 'nearly split in two'" relays finding from the American Journal of Human Genetics. Basically, 150,000 years ago a population split off and inhabited southern Africa, where they lived in isolation from the east African group for 50-100,000 years:

Dr Wells told BBC News: "Once this population reached southern Africa, it was cut off from the eastern African population by these drought events which were on the route between them."

Modern humans are often presumed to have originated in East Africa and then spread out to populate other areas. But the data could equally support an origin in southern Africa followed by a migration to East and West Africa.

The genetic data show that populations came back together as a single, pan-African population about 40,000 years ago.

This renewed contact appears to coincide with the development of more advanced stone tool technology and may have been helped by more favourable environmental conditions.

Neat.