The Galaxy has been colonised but why the big feet?
Far, far into the future, pretty much the entire Milky Way has been colonised by humans. The thing is that now the Empire has fallen, the technology of FTL travel has been lost in most places. Those who still have it are too busy fighting a war amongst themselves to be concerned with far-flung outposts.
Evolution has continued differently on different planets. Humans have evolved to fit the local conditions.
On the planet Schmell, there is a mutation that causes the human inhabitants all to have enormous feet while retaining pretty ordinary human proportions in every other respect.
Typically a six-foot male would have feet that are 2 ft (0.6 meters) in length.
Question
What evolutionary or other pressures could plausibly cause this phenomenon and prevent it from dying out?
Notes
People still walk 'normally'.
Their feet are roughly twice as wide as 'normal' feet as well as twice the length.
The planet has been terraformed and can be considered very similar to Earth in most respects.
With the fall of civilisation on Schmell, the people still have memories and artefacts of the past but they are reduced to a pre-industrial style of living.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/136670. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1 answer
Schmell gets the snow. Man, does it get the snow. You think it snows where you live? You should see the snow in Schmell!
To walk around on all the deep, white, frozen precipitation, it helps to be able to distribute your weight over a large surface area, that is, to have big feet. Small-footed people sink into the snow and are unable to continue their journey to market. Then they starve and die, and are thus rendered unable to pass along their genes any more. It's sad really, but there you have it.
As usual, let's present some parallels to the Real World (TM). Critters that live in snow tend toward big feet. The Eurasian Lynx comes to mind, along with the Arctic Hare, the Snowy Owl, the Polar Bear, the Adelie Penguin, and Nordic tribes-folk who invented these clever things:
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/136756. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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