There’s a version of this article you’ve probably read before. It goes something like: our ancestors squatted and ran barefoot across the savanna, then we invented chairs and sneakers and ruined ourselves, and the solution is to throw both away.
It’s a good story. It’s also mostly wrong, and the real history is considerably more interesting — and more useful.
Because the problem isn’t that we sit, and it isn’t that we wear shoes. Humans have done both for a very long time. What changed is something subtler, more recent, and much easier to do something about.
The chair is old. The office is not.
Chairs show up in the archaeological record thousands of years ago. Egyptian furniture, Greek klismos chairs, Roman seating — humans have been building things to sit on for as long as they’ve been building things.
But for almost all of that history, the chair was a status object. It belonged to the pharaoh, the magistrate, the bishop. Ordinary people sat on the ground, on stools, on benches, on their heels. The word “chairman” survives as a fossil of this: the chair was the seat of authority, and there was usually only one of them in the room.
What’s genuinely new is not the chair. It’s the chair-shaped life — the notion that a typical adult will spend eight hours seated in an upholstered, back-supporting, arm-resting chair at work, then transfer to a similar one in a car, then to a softer one in front of a screen. That arrangement is roughly a century and a half old, and it became near-universal only within living memory.
That’s the actual novelty. Not sitting. Sitting in one particular way, for almost all of it.
The finding that reframes the whole argument
The most illuminating research in this area doesn’t come from an ergonomics lab. It comes from anthropologists studying the Hadza of Tanzania, one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer populations.
The expectation was straightforward: people who forage for their food, walk long distances, and have no furniture would be far less sedentary than office workers. Researchers fitted them with activity monitors to find out.
The result was not what anyone predicted. The Hadza were inactive for around nine to ten hours a day — comparable to figures reported for adults in industrialized countries. They rest a great deal. They are not in constant motion.
The difference was in how they rested. Instead of chairs, they used squatting and kneeling — postures the researchers described as “active rest,” because muscle activity in the legs during these positions is substantially higher than during chair sitting. They were resting, but their bodies were still doing something.
This reframes the entire conversation. The issue was never that humans evolved to avoid sitting still — clearly we didn’t. It’s that we found a way to sit still that asks almost nothing of us, and then we did it for most of our waking hours.
The shoe is old. The modern shoe is not.
The footwear timeline runs along similar lines.
The oldest directly dated shoes we’ve found are sagebrush bark sandals, roughly ten thousand years old. The oldest known leather shoe is about five and a half thousand years old. Some researchers argue, from changes in toe bone thickness, that habitual footwear may go back tens of thousands of years further. Humans have been covering their feet for a very long time, and for good reasons: thorns, rocks, cold, and broken things.
What’s new is everything else the shoe now does.
The elevated heel began as functional cavalry equipment for keeping a boot in a stirrup, migrated into European aristocratic fashion as a marker of status among men, and only later became coded as women’s wear. The thickly cushioned athletic shoe as we know it is a product of the 1970s running boom — younger than most of the people reading this.
So the object isn’t new. The design brief is. A shoe used to be a protective layer. A modern shoe is a protective layer plus a raised heel plus a compliant foam platform plus a stiffened sole plus a tapered shape — a set of features that, between them, substantially reduce how much work the foot has to do to hold you up and move you around.
What actually changed: three things
Strip the history down and three specific variables shifted, none of which is “we started sitting” or “we started wearing shoes.”
Duration. Any position is fine for a while. Almost none are fine for nine hours. Static loading, of any kind, gradually deforms soft tissue and reduces blood flow through working muscle. Your body’s response is to make you uncomfortable so that you’ll move. Fidgeting is not restlessness — it’s a functioning warning system.
Uniformity. A hunter-gatherer resting across a day cycles through squatting, kneeling, sitting on the ground, leaning, and lying down. An office worker cycles through one chair, one car seat, and one couch. The number of distinct positions a modern body visits in a day has collapsed, and with it the range of angles, loads, and tissue lengths the body regularly experiences.
Removed demand. This is the shoe’s contribution. A foot that spends its life on flat, uniform surfaces inside a stiff, supportive, cushioned container is a foot that is rarely asked to stabilize, spread, grip, or adapt. Tissue capacity follows demand. Reduce the demand for long enough and the capacity quietly follows it down — which you won’t notice until the day you ask for it back.
Now the part most articles like this get wrong
Here’s where the usual version of this argument goes off the rails, so let’s be careful.
“Sitting is the new smoking” is a slogan, not a finding. It’s catchy and it’s been repeated into apparent fact. Large pooled analyses tracking over a million people have found that high levels of daily physical activity substantially attenuate — in some analyses effectively eliminate — the excess mortality risk associated with prolonged sitting. Sitting a lot matters. It is not equivalent to smoking, and framing it that way generates anxiety rather than action.
Posture is not the culprit you’ve been told it is. Systematic reviews have repeatedly failed to find a consistent link between how someone sits and whether they develop back pain. Slouching is not damaging your spine. The evidence that “correcting” posture treats pain is weak. What matters far more than the shape you sit in is how long you hold it.
Standing desks are not the answer either. They reliably reduce sitting time, which is worth something. Their effect on musculoskeletal pain is modest and inconsistent, and standing still for eight hours brings its own problems. Swapping one static position for another static position solves less than you’d hope.
And barefoot is not a cure. People who transition into minimal footwear too quickly develop bone stress injuries in the foot at meaningful rates — this is well documented. Feet that have been supported for forty years need a graded, patient build-up, the same as any other tissue. Anyone with diabetes or reduced sensation in their feet should not experiment here at all without medical guidance.
The honest version of this argument is much less dramatic than the popular one. Nobody needs to throw out their chair or their shoes. They need to stop treating either one as a full-time environment.
What to actually do with this
Reintroduce the variable that history removed: variation.
Change position often — not into a better position, just into a different one. Sit on the floor while you watch television and shift between postures. Own more than one pair of shoes and rotate them by task rather than wearing one pair for everything. Spend some time each week with your feet doing genuine work: barefoot on grass or sand, on uneven ground, calf and foot strengthening built into whatever training you already do. Build enough capacity that no single environment defines what you’re able to do.
None of that requires buying anything. Most of it requires only noticing.
Find out what your version looks like
General principles get you partway. What they can’t tell you is which of your specific aches trace back to fourteen hours of sameness, where your movement is genuinely restricted, and what your feet and hips can currently handle.
Berman Health Club offers a free discovery visit — no cost, no obligation.
It’s a conversation with our team about how you move, what’s bothering you, and what’s realistically worth changing. If we’re not the right fit for you, we’ll say so.
