Eve
How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution
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5.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“A page-turning whistle-stop tour of mammalian development that begins in the Jurassic Era, Eve recasts the traditional story of evolutionary biology by placing women at its center…. The book is engaging, playful, erudite, discursive and rich with detail." —The New York Times
“A smart, funny, scientific deep-dive into the power of a woman’s body, Eve surprises, educates, and emboldens.”—Bonnie Garmus, #1 New York Times best-selling author of Lessons in Chemistry
An ambitious, eye-opening, myth-busting and groundbreaking history of the evolution of the female body, by a brilliant new researcher and writer
Why do women live longer than men? Why do women have menopause? Why are women more likely to get Alzheimer’s? Why do girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet? And does the female brain really exist?
In Eve, Cat Bohannon answers questions scientists should have been addressing for decades. With boundless curiosity and sharp wit, she covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex. Eve is not only a sweeping revision of human history, it’s an urgent and necessary corrective for a world that has focused primarily on the male body for far too long. Bohannon’s findings, including everything from the way C-sections in the industrialized world are rearranging women’s pelvic shape to the surprising similarities between pus and breast milk, will completely change what you think you know about evolution and why Homo sapiens have become such a successful and dominant species, from tool use to city building to the development of language.
A 21st-century update of Our Bodies, Ourselves, Eve offers a true paradigm shift in our thinking about what the female body is and why it matters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cognition researcher Bohannon's ambitious debut "traces the evolution of women's bodies, from tits to toes." She explains that milk production likely evolved around 205 million years ago from the "moistening mucus" that rodent-like pre-mammals coated their eggs with, and that the antecedent to human wombs first developed 65 million years ago in a "weasel-squirrel" whose legs lifted it high enough off the ground to accommodate carrying "a swollen uterus." Comparisons with other species enlighten, as when Bohannon contends that because humans didn't evolve to have "trapdoor" vaginas—such as those of mallards, who can redirect sperm from unwanted partners away from the ovaries—it's likely "ancient hominins just weren't all that rapey." Bohannon offers a bracing corrective to male-centric evolutionary accounts, arguing that female hominins were likely on two legs before their male counterparts because they needed to provide more food for their offspring and so benefitted more from being able to carry large quantities of stuff in their arms, and she balances scientific rigor with entertaining prose ("The truth is we should have more vaginas," she writes, explaining how the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs significantly depleted the planet's marsupial population, most of which have between two and four vaginas). It's an illuminating and fresh take on how human evolution unfolded.
