FYI: Do I Really Need My Pinky Toe?
Toes! Dreamstime And without it, could I do everything a five-toed human does? Walking, running and skipping with just four toes may be easier than you think. "If you're born without a pinky toe or have an accident and it's removed, you can completely do everything you wanted to do," Dr. Anne Holly Johnson, instructor in orthopaedic surgery at Harvard Medical School, says. So why do we have pinky toes? The answer goes back to the evolutionary history of humans, explains Dr. Anish Kadakia, assistant professor in orthopaedic surgery at Northwestern University. "Primates use their feet to grab, claw, to climb trees, but humans, we don't need that function anymore," Kadakia says. "Clearly we're not jumping up and down trees and using our feet to grab. We have toes embryologically, evolutionary for that particular reason because we descended from apes, but we don't need them as people." While our feet no longer help us...