A lesson learned from EVE: HOW THE FEMALE BODY DROVE 200 MILLION YEARS OF HUMAN EVOLUTION, by Cat Bohannon

 All of human society is poorer with how little regard women have been given over the ages.

          Every now and then I break my standard of reading History books and try to catch up on what’s happening in the world of science. It’s become a depressing exercise recently as I live in a country that has now publicly disowned science, and one thought that occurred to me as I read it was that I might have to start relying on other countries’ scientific studies to actually keep up with developments. For now, it was a fascinating and informative exercise to read Cat Bohannon’s Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, which uses evidence from the fossil and genetic record to speculate how females drove some of the most important developments in all of human history (and prehistory). Bohannon uses those examples to offer a larger commentary of the failings of modern human societies to properly support human and gain from all the knowledge that the female body has to offer us in advancing modern medicine and government policy.

            Bohannon’s book is dense (filled with fascinating-but-long footnotes with further anecdotes and observations), and is probably best read in small doses. However, I learned a great deal that I had never known about the details of the female body and experience. Through each chapter, she examines different aspects of women’s anatomy (breasts, womb, legs, brain perception, voice, etc.) through the lens of its evolutionary history, and how women influenced the subsequent development of human societies. Each chapter tells a different story, and there’s too much for me to properly summarize in this blog. Some notable examples that gripped me? Bohannon offers a fascinating theory that women must have been the inventors of such basic human traits as language (who spends so much time trying to teach babies how to communicate?) and weapons (would they not have way more incentive to create defensive tools compared to bigger, stronger males?). She also provides compelling evidence as to how important of leadership roles women must have had in our most ancient societies, such as our basic physical structures (as she points out, male-dominated, rapey animals tend to have incredibly complicated and uncomfortable genital structures, and males are often double the size of females; by contrast, humans’ relative simple and pleasurable genitalia and relatively equal physical sizes, imply ancient matriarchal societies where women had a great role in their choice of partners and structure of their social groups).

            Bohannon ends the book with a moving and compelling plea for modern human societies to abandon old stereotypes and do more to support women, not just for their own benefit but for the good of all human societies. When women suffer from poor maternal care and repressive political policies, it leads to higher mother and infant mortality, and the United States in particular has terrible statistics on these compared to other major industrial countries. In addition to overall death and poor health, Bohannon also points out that unhealthy mothers then give birth to and raise generations of children who are less likely to develop in a healthy manner, and more susceptible to trauma and various physical and mental ailments. As she points out, sexism is a plague that makes everyone poorer and less healthy, and the advancement of humanity might very well count on giving more power and agency to women. Overall, Bohannon’s book is a fascinating and compelling scientific study that shows just how important of a role women have played in the advancement of human civilizations, and much will be lost as long as we live in a nation that does not encourage them to develop their scientific knowledge and societal perspectives.

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