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.
There are bits of information here I'd known before...medicine assumes male bodies are the default; breast milk can change to best help its baby...but there's so much more here, going so much deeper than I expected. Female bodies are amazing and this book aims to celebrate that.
First of all; don't panic too much. This is a hugely fat book, but about a third of it, at the back, is taken up with notes and references and resources and further reading. (If you're the kind who loves a doorstopper, I apologise. This is still pretty long, though; on my proof copy the 'reading' section ends at around 400 pages.)
Cat has chosen various aspects of femininity; the expected 'Breasts' and 'womb' but also 'Tools' and 'Communication' are among them, but there's also several others. For each, she's gone as far back in evolutionary terms as possible to find the earliest example of that trait, and then traced it forward again. That means that some of our Eves are ratlike mammals or squirrellike monkeys! Everything is roughly in chronological order, but it does drift a little within chapters.
Some of the information does get quite specific and heavy, but Cat keeps it conversational and as light as possible, peppering it all with anecdotes drawn from her life or those of her fellow professors and other people she's known. It helps to tie things together and makes it feel a little like we're just chatting over coffee. And there's so much to take in here; I'll be coming back to reread and pick things out and check for quizzes for quite a while!
You have to work at it a little, but this is a great read that everyone should read at least once.
Eve publishes on the 3rd of October, 2023 in the US (top image) and on the 12th of October, 2023 in the UK (lower image). I received a free copy and am giving an honest review.
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