Wooden shoes, wouldn't listen.

Had Dutch farmers opted for some sensible footwear instead of the beloved 'klompen' almost two centuries ago, perhaps they wouldn't have suffered rare bone lesions in their feet.

But then again, without evidence of those achy-breaky feet, Western University bio-archeologists wouldn't have been able to discover a pattern of bone chips that could help us understand micro-injuries.

What they found was you are what you put on your feet.

“What we choose to wear on our feet plays a big role in the injuries and trauma our feet can sustain,” said Andrea Waters-Rist, an associate professor of anthropology who co-authored the study, in a Thursday statement.

Waters-Rist and a team from Leiden University, the oldest university in The Netherlands, found a pattern of bone chips in the feet of 19th-century Dutch farmers who wore the beloved, inflexible clogs.

They examined bones during the relocation of a church cemetery in the village of Middenbeemster, not far from Amsterdam.

Five-hundred skeletons from the dairy-farming area were put under the archeological microscope. The research team was able to determine their diet, disease and health.

It was the obvious discovery of rare bone lesions called osteochondritis dissecans (OD) that was cause for a second thought about the wooden shoe.

“They’re like craters in the bones, at the joints, as if chunks of bone have just been chiselled away,” Waters-Rist said. “We didn’t need a microscope to see them, they were that obvious.”

The shoes, they surmised, were part of the cause.

“These shoes are hard and inflexible and are poor shock-absorbers. This was a time before industrialization and you can imagine people using their clog-covered feet to hammer, stomp, or kick an object into place, inflicting impact injuries in their feet,” Waters-Rist said.

The clogs, plus the hard physical work, caused the micro-trauma to their feet – and that's a modern-day lesson about why comfort over fashion makes sense.

“Look at what high heels do: the constriction of our toes, the strain it places on our joints. If bio-archeologists were to come along in 100 or 500 years and look at the bones of our feet — would they ask, what on Earth were these people wearing?” said Waters-Rist.

Score another point for sneakers.