Metatarsal torsion in humans and footwear type
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Metatarsal torsion has been hypothesized to be a plastic trait that can be influenced by the type of shoes worn in human populations. Wearing stiff‐sole shoes tend to result in narrower feet and higher longitudinal arches. These modifications are expected to translate into less torsion of the hallucal metatarsal but greater torsion of the four lateral metatarsals. In addition, there is some evidence that women have higher arches than men, so women are expected to have greater torsion of the lateral four metatarsals. To test these hypotheses, this paper compares men and women from two archaeological populations, Amerinds and Eurocanadians, that are documented to have worn very different shoe types, soft moccasins for the former and hard‐sole leather shoes or wooden clogs for the latter. First, we test for sexual differences within both populations, and, second, we compare the two populations. Our results show no significant differences between men and women. The similarity in torsional values for males and females is explained by the very small arch height difference documented in modern populations, a difference that is likely too small to translate into significantly different torsional values. However, the two populations had significantly different torsional values in the direction expected from the effect of wearing stiff‐sole shoes for all metatarsals except the second. The lack of differences of the second metatarsal is explained by its “keystone” position in the transverse arch of the foot; the foot shape modification brought about by wearing stiff shoes does not alter the orientation of the second metatarsals base, only raising it higher. As a consequence, torsional values for that metatarsal do not differ despite arch height differences. This study shows that metatarsal torsion values, at the population level, can inform on the type of footwear worn by past populations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".