Thank Eve for Human Evolution
In October, at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in England, Cat Bohannon was sporting a pink latex top and a mischievous twinkle in her eye. She and I shared a stage to talk about our recent books; in my case, Bitch: On the Female of the Species; in hers, Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. We hit it off immediately.
Eve, Bohannon’s first book, is a sweeping revision of human history that places the female body center stage, instead of just a feminine footnote to the macho main event. Bohannon, a Ph.D. from Columbia University (where she studied the evolution of narrative), with a sideline in poetry and performance, tells this epic tale through a series of “Eves”—presumed ancestors who vaulted various biological hurdles, with pivotal consequences for our evolutionary path.
Talking to Cat Bohannon is like being struck by a tornado of ideas.
Eve begins in the Jurassic period with a small rodent Morganucodon, nicknamed Morgie by the Smithsonian, which laid eggs and lacked nipples but nevertheless became the first mammalian breast feeder. We discover that milk is alarmingly like pus, but with added prebiotics for developing gut health. Next comes Protungulatum donnae, “our womb’s great-grand-rat,” who managed to survive the apocalypse that wiped out the dinosaurs by inventing the placental pregnancy.
By the time we get to our hominin ancestors, with their ever-expanding brains, this internal incubation system is starting to creak—mammalian mothers are at war with their fetuses over limited resources, and hominin heads too big to pass through the pelvis. It is this fundamental biological limitation that shaped our trajectory far more than
