Eve
How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution
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4.3 • 32 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION FINALIST • THE REAL ORIGIN OF OUR SPECIES: a myth-busting, eye-opening landmark account of how humans evolved, offering a paradigm shift in our thinking about what the female body is, how it came to be, and how this evolution still shapes all our lives today
“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."
—Sarah Lyall, 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
How did the female body drive 200 million years of human evolution? • Why do women live longer than men? • 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? • Is sexism useful for evolution? • And why, seriously why, do women have to sweat through our sheets every night when we hit menopause?
These questions are producing some truly exciting science – and in Eve, with boundless curiosity and sharp wit, Cat Bohannon covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex: “We need a kind of user's manual for the female mammal. A no-nonsense, hard-hitting, seriously researched (but readable) account of what we are. How female bodies evolved, how they work, what it really means to biologically be a woman. Something that would rewrite the story of womanhood. This book is that story. We have to put the female body in the picture. If we don't, it's not just feminism that's compromised. Modern medicine, neurobiology, paleoanthropology, even evolutionary biology all take a hit when we ignore the fact that half of us have breasts. So it's time we talk about breasts. Breasts, and blood, and fat, and vaginas, and wombs—all of it. How they came to be and how we live with them now, no matter how weird or hilarious the truth is.”
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. Picking up where Sapiens left off, Eve will completely change what you think you know about evolution and why Homo sapiens has become such a successful and dominant species.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Both men and women have a lot to learn from Cat Bohannon’s wise, witty history of the female body. Her research encompasses not only humanity but the female mammal in general, so her story starts long before the first humans came along. But it leads all the way up to the modern woman, and along the way, we learn about the development of everything from the womb to breast milk to menopause. Bohannon unspools surprising facts about the role of women in shaping society (don’t believe the movie 2001, she says—women made the first weapons), and she schools us on the ways in which science has historically given women’s bodies the short end of the stick. But Bohannon brings a whole lot of humor and engaging ideas to the huge expanse of knowledge she covers, too, making the experience fun and eye-opening. Eve is as informative as a textbook—and as entertaining as a novel.
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.
Customer Reviews
Finally the biology of feminism
A remarkable work of research explains where women come from, what we’re made of, and why our species depends upon us for survival. The future is female because the past was female.