Big and Beautiful: Large Feet Sexier Than Small Ones in North Sumatra Women

Move over, Cinderella. You're no longer the belle of the ball. While most cultures view women with petite feet as attractive, people in the northern part of the Indonesian island of Sumatra think the opposite. Women with big feet are instead considered to be beautiful.

In the past, researchers believed that a preference for mates with small feet, smooth skin or an hourglass figure may have evolved in the brains of our Pleistocene ancestors. In fact, scientists believed that it was possible that a preference for these qualities were hard-wired into our genetic makeup. These attributes signaled a potential mate's youth and fertility.

Yet it turns out that this isn't the case. Culture--and not just genetics--plays a huge role in deciding what makes a mate attractive. In order to study these preferences, the researcher showed five drawings to 159 Karo Batak adults. The Karo Batak mostly live in scattered rural villages, which makes them a perfect culture to study without outisde influences. The five drawings depicted a barefoot woman with her long hair pulled back and dressed in a shirt and skirt reaching her mid-calf. The drawings were all the same except for a slight difference in foot size.

So what was the result? It turns out that both male and female participants judged the drawing of the woman with the largest feet as the most attractive. The woman with the smallest feet, in contrast, was viewed as the least attractive. It's very possible that this predilection for big feet is linked to the Karo Batak's remoteness; they're rural, agricultural and have limited exposure to Western media.

"This new research supports that idea that cultural transmission of mate preferences allows humans to adapt to local environments, and this may trump hard-wired preferences," said Geoff Kushnick, a University of Washington anthropologist, in a news release. "Cultural and social influences play a stronger role in mate choice than some evolutionary psychologists are willing to accept."

Yet the findings don't only show that humans aren't just influenced by genetics. They also hint at how humans continue to evolve. Culture could actually drive human evolution, since mating preferences drive sexual selection.

The findings are published in the journal Human Nature.