We don’t have one mother; we have many. And to each Eve, her particular Eden: We have the breasts we do because mammals evolved to make milk. We have the wombs we do because we evolved to “hatch” our eggs inside our own bodies. We have the faces we do, and our human sensory perception along with it, because primates evolved to live in trees. Our bipedal legs, our tool use, our fatty brains and chatty mouths and menopausal grandmothers — all of these traits that make us “human” came about at different times in our evolutionary past. In truth, we have billions of Edens, but just a handful of places and times that made our bodies the way they are. These particular Edens are often where we speciated: when our bodies evolved in ways that made us too different from others to be able to breed with them anymore. And if you want to understand women’s bodies, it’s largely these Eves and their Edens you need to think about.
In an often recounted story, a journalist recalled being in an Anthropology class when her female professor held up a picture of an antler with 28 tally marks carved upon it, saying: "This is alleged to be man's first attempt at a calendar." We all looked at the bone in admiration. "Tell me," she continued, "what man needs to know when 28 days have passed? I suspect that this is woman's first attempt at a calendar." In Eve: How the Female Body Drove Human Evolution, author Cat Bohannon (with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition) expands on this idea of considering the needs of the female of our species when looking for the catalysts behind the great shifts in our development — from bipedal locomotion to language and tool use — and in a narrative that starts with the first tiny mammal that coexisted with the dinosaurs and traces that story up to today’s reality, Bohannon has assembled a fascinating, comprehensive, and entertaining study of what is usually left out of the story of “us” — all while making a forceful case for why focussing on the history of the female body matters for the future of all of humanity. In a quirky bit of formatting, Bohannon starts each chapter with a glimpse at the “Eve” of a new development — the Eve of lactation is a Morganucodon sweating beads of milk through her fur in an underground den during the Jurassic Period; the Eve of menopause is a grandmother using her experience to serve as an emergency midwife in early Jericho — and I found the format charming. I loved everything about this (even if it did take quite a while to read) and I would unhesitatingly recommend it to any reader. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
It’s not that topflight scientists still think female bodies were made when God pulled a rib from Adam’s side, but the assumption that being sexed is simply a matter of sex organs — that somehow being female is just a minor tweak on a Platonic form — is a bit like that old Bible story. And that story is a lie. As we’ve increasingly learned, female bodies aren’t just male bodies with “extra stuff” (fat, breasts, uteri). Nor are testicles and ovaries swappable. Being sexed permeates every major feature of our mammalian bodies and the lives we live inside them, for mouse and human alike. When scientists study only the male norm, we’re getting less than half of a complicated picture; all too often, we don’t know what we’re missing by ignoring sex differences, because we’re not asking the question.
I first encountered this idea of the Platonic form (and the Homo sapien female being merely a weaker variation on the male ideal) and its persistent chauvinism affecting medical research in Invisible Women. Relatedly, Bohannon includes in her Introduction recent research into women’s “gluteofemoral” fat (on hips, buttocks, and upper thigh) — ie., the “stubborn” padding that a woman might turn to liposuction to remove — writing that it is composed of unique and essential lipids (accumulated since childhood) that are vital during pregnancy and breastfeeding to build a baby’s brain and eyes. But apparently no one, before the author, ever asked what the ramifications might be when a post-liposuction woman becomes pregnant. When Bohannon later introduces the genesis of breasts and placental wombs and women's heightened sensory perception — each of which development was absolutely essential to evolving our species into what it is today — it’s hard not to think that perhaps the female form is the pinnacle of human evolution, with the stripped-down male contributing some sperm now and then. Bohannon makes a strong case that the first tools were probably gynecological — we were still opportunistic scavengers long after walking upright and growing large brains made human childbirth a risky business, so the first tools were likely not hunting related since we’re here to tell the tale — and she also makes the case that human language (with grammar and syntax that differentiates it from animal communication), however it arose, was passed down, mother to child:
The majority of scientific stories about the evolution of human language fall in line: at each turn, human innovation has been driven by groups of men solving man-problems. One popular tale holds that language happened because we became hunters, forming large parties (of men) who needed to shout complex directions at one another across wide savannas. But wolves are pretty fantastic hunters, do it in groups, come up with surprisingly complex plans for the hunt that depend on members performing diverse roles, and don’t have a lick of language…So the male narrative of the evolution of human language misses the point. Language isn’t like opposable thumbs or flat faces — traits that evolution wrote into our genes. Our capacity for learning and innovating in language is innate, but nevertheless, for the largest gains in intergenerational communication to persist over time, each generation has to pass language on to the next with careful effort, interactive learning, and guided development. Language, in other words, is something that mothers and their babies make together and is dependent on the relationship between them in those first critical three to five years of human life. A long, unbroken chain of mothers and offspring trying to communicate with each other — that’s what’s kept this language thing going from the beginning.
Eve is stuffed with interesting facts — I did not know that openings in a breastfeeding woman’s areola “uptakes” her baby’s saliva to scan for infection and send specific immunity supports, or that a stress hormone is released in women when they hear a baby crying (while the top frequencies of a crying baby are cut off in the male hearing range) or that reducing the number of girls married before they are eighteen by even 10 percent can reduce a country’s maternal mortality by 70 percent — supported by pages of footnotes and citations. I trusted the research. But Bohannon’s main thesis seems to be that, despite nearly dying off a couple of times, our species has been able to thrive and populate the entire planet primarily because we mastered gynecology; learning to have the right number of babies, raised at the right time, according to the resources of their mothers’ community. And while advances in birth control and midwifery did improve maternal outcomes, it was sexism — controlling the bodies of fertile females and controlling who had access to them — that did most of the work. Now that medical advances in birth control, midwifery, and gynecology ought to guarantee maternal outcomes — and this again stresses the need for proper medical research on the female body — Bohannon suggests that it’s past time we released ourselves from the cultural constraints of sexism. (Even in America, maternal death rates are on the rise: a hot combination of racism, sexism, ableism, reduced public support for female health, and the crippling of science-based sex education has finally made it more dangerous for American women to be pregnant than it used to be.)
Now, I’m hardly the sort of person who wants to think of women as simply baby factories. But as a species, let’s say all of us want to get smarter. That’s what it takes to cure cancer. To solve the climate crisis. How do we do that? For a start, we might want to acknowledge that human brains are something that are made primarily out of women’s bodies: first in their wombs, and then from their breast milk, and then from the quality of interactions mothers have with their children. So if you want the best possible chance to make a lot of kids with high IQs, you want healthy women who are fed well, and have been fed well, consistently, for at least two decades before they become pregnant. You want them to have had a rich and well-supported childhood education. And you want them to be well cared for throughout their reproductive lives, with readily available education about nutrition and healthy habits and newborn caretaking. You want them to have community resources available when they get sick and when their kids get sick. And, because STIs have such a proven effect on reproductive health, you want them to have ready access to prophylactics and good sex ed.
So, ultimately, this isn’t simply an objective overview of the science behind “how the female body drove evolution”. But as I agree with Bohannon’s conclusions regarding the need to eliminate the atavistic drive to control female bodies (which is somehow increasing around the world?), I’m still happy to have read this. It’s scholarly and engaging and necessary. This should absolutely be read alongside popular male-focussed histories like Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens; he left out the bits about how the first cities were made possible by wet nurses.
Also: from the beginning, it's clear that Bohannon uses the terms "female" and "woman" to refer exclusively to cisgendered XX folks —
In the world of scientific research, there’s been very little attention to what happens in the bodies of people assigned one or another sex at birth who then go on to identify differently. In part, that’s because there’s a massive difference between biological sex — something wound deep into the warp and weft of our physical development, from in-cell organelles all the way up to whole-body features, and built over billions of years of evolutionary history — and humanity’s gender identity, which is a fluid thing and brain based and at most a few hundred thousand years old.
I acknowledge that this passage might not satisfy all readers — and that some readers might be put off by her sole focus on mothers as infant caregivers — so I drop this here as warning.
