Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution
By Cat Bohannon
Eve is a groundbreaking history of the female body, placing women at the center of the evolutionary success of Homo sapiens.
Why do women live longer than men? Why do women experience menopause? Why are women more likely to get Alzheimer’s? How did wet-nursing lead to the growth of civilization? Does the “Female Brain” really exist? And did you know that our ancient grandmothers were a huge part of how we invented human culture? That women’s mouths are the root of human language and women’s breasts are part of how mammals took over the earth, the reason we have immune systems that can survive pandemics?
In Eve, Cat Bohannon answers questions scientists should have been addressing for decades. With boundless curiosity and a razor sharp wit, she covers the past 200 million years to explain the science behind the development of the female sex. Tracing our current traits back to specific ancestors in our past, Bohannon tells the story of how women’s bodies came to be so different from men’s, even deep in our cells, and why this still matters for the human species.
Eve is not only a sweeping revision of human history, but also 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 has become such a successful and dominant species, from tool use to city building to the development of language.
Picking up where Sapiens left off, Eve is a landmark book, offering a true paradigm shift in our thinking about what the female body is and why it matters.
Cat Bohannon completed her Ph.D. in 2022 at Columbia University, where she studied the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her writing has appeared in Scientific American, Science, The Best American Non-required Reading, and The Georgia Review, and on The Story Collider. This is her first book. She lives in the United States with her partner and their two offspring.