Book review: Cat Bohannon’s Eve a seminal work that argues for female-led evolution

Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years Of Human Evolution

By Cat Bohannon

Non-fiction/Alfred A. Knopf/Paperback/437 pages/$29.07/Amazon SG (amzn.to/3uz11qA)
5 stars

It should come as no surprise that women’s bodies have been simultaneously overscrutinised and understudied.

The male body has been seen as the norm for so long that it has become intuitive to think of female bodies as just “a minor tweak on a Platonic form”, a body with “extra stuff” – fat, breasts, uteri.

But just how much this matters might not have been argued so persuasively and engagingly until now, with this book by author Cat Bohannon, who surveys 200 million years to make her case.

Hers is an evolutionary and philosophical argument. The development of core tenets of what makes humans – upright posture, brains, the ability to problem-solve and the capacity for love – has been driven over millions of years by changes in the female body, not the male one.

But her argument is also a civilisational and existential one.

According to Bohannon, past societies that have valued women tended to be more successful. Sexism may have, at one point, helped to establish patriarchal lineage. But it is today choking out humanity, killing women, under-feeding and under-educating them so that they are unable to make the best decision for their children in a way that works against the species’ long-term survival.

Astudent of the “evolution of narrative and cognition”, Bohannon is better than most scientists at telling her story.

She draws from filmic sources, including a feminist rewrite of the famous opening sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and handholds readers through scientific terms such as “otoacoustic emissions” (sounds generated by the inner ear) with choice lines: “Babies do not pitter-patter. Babies boom boom boom.”

But the real genius is how she has chosen to structure her content, adamantly resisting commercial pressures of the punchline.

Instead of clickbait questions like, “Why are women better equipped to survive a zombie apocalypse?” – which she answers – she opts for the scholarly and endlessly more fascinating approach of searching for Eves, the mostly non-human ancestors that represent significant paradigm shifts in Homo sapiens’ evolutionary history.

There is the rat-like Morganucodon (Morgie) from 205 million years ago, which gave the world mammalian milk. Bohannon quickly upends expectations of this apparently trivial innovation by explaining its nutritious, immunity-building, gut-forming and even personality-forming properties.

Other markers, such as bipedalism and the human voice, are more conventional, but Bohannon takes readers to unexpected places.

A chapter on legs becomes an exploration of whether women can truly be considered to be the weaker sex, when they have more slow twitch muscles built for endurance, are better at converting fat into energy, and are able to recover faster.

The female Ardipithecus ramidus from 4.4 million years ago had to walk long distances across grass plains in search of food, likely carrying a baby with her upper limbs.

As for speech, while people associate booming, lower voices with authority, it is the voice of the mother – that higher-pitched, instinctive baby talk that emphasises vowels – that helps pass on language.

Bohannon even imagines that the first story might have been told by a mother 300,000 years ago to soothe her baby, though this is difficult to prove, as writing would not be invented until much later.

In Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years Of Human Evolution, author Cat Bohannon argues that past societies that have valued women tended to be more successful. PHOTO: STEFANO GIOVANNINI

In each complex comparison of the male and female bodies, Bohannon dismantles assumed narratives of male superiority – shifting the goalposts back to that juncture in time when these traits evolved for reasons of species survival.

This same proof of sex difference – “wound deep into the warp and weft of our physical development, from in-cell organelles all the way up to whole-body features” – also makes the case that medicine should take women seriously.

Women are still more likely to die from heart attacks today from misdiagnosis, even though they are less likely to suffer it.

The book changes readers’ perceptions in another way too, by re-asserting the body amid modern tendencies to emphasise the performativity of gender.

Human bodies, flawed as they are, continue to tell important stories of humanity’s past – biological traits that fail more often, such as the womb, indicate a more recent genesis.

Fascinating insights can also be drawn by comparing the human body to those of animals, which represent alternative evolutionary paths. Relatively straightforward human sex organs, for example, compared with the bells-and-whistles dog or duck genitalia suggest rape was not common among human ancestors.

It is clear Bohannon’s views on identity are progressive: This must be discovered at the nexus of gender and sex, and the very need to classify is due to sexism and societal prejudice.

After all, “why on earth would it matter which toilet one uses if no one feels that the body is shameful?” – an enlightened view of the body is also a liberating one.

If you like this, read: The Right To Sex by Amia Srinivasan (Bloomsbury, 2021, $19, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/3sIP7tX). Oxford professor Amia Srinivasan trots out six essays on sex – from the dangers of pornography to interracial dating to why everyone should question his or her sexual choices.

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