Eve
How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution (Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction)
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024
FOYLE'S NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023
LONGLISTED FOR BLACKWELL'S NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023
ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S BEST IDEAS BOOKS OF 2023
ONE OF THE TELEGRAPH'S FIFTY BEST BOOKS OF 2023
ONE OF PROSPECT'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2023
ONE OF DUA LIPA'S SERVICE95 RECOMMENDATIONS FOR '5 INSPIRING READS TO KICK START THE NEW YEAR'
'Funny and very important' Chris van Tulleken, bestseling author of Ultra-Processed People
'Educates and emboldens' Bonnie Garmus, bestselling author of Lessons in Chemistry
'Should revolutionise our understanding of human life' George Monbiot, bestselling author of Regenesis
'A vast and revolutionary history of female evolution' Sunday Times
How did wet nurses drive civilization? Are women always the weaker sex? Is sexism useful for evolution? And are our bodies at war with our babies?
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.
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.
