This book is an edifying journey into the evolution of our species through the female body. Or, rather, how it was the females of our species that mainly drove our evolution, and here, the author goes through some key adaptations and entertaining stories through “our Eve’s”.
I really enjoyed the “Eve’s timeline”. Throughout its pages, we encounter many of our “Eve’s”…The author created this type of timeline going through stories of different mammalian fossils: the first rodent-like mammal to produce something like “the first type of breast milk” before breasts were a thing; the eve’s of the ‘single-vagina’; the eves of bipedalism; and the hypotheses for the origin of our different senses as we know them (and their sex-differences).
Beyond physical adaptations, social adaptations have also shaped who we are. This might not seem so surprising, but for me it was jaw-dropping to learn that the origin of “gynecology” predates “males hunting with tools”. On top of that, this is a hypothesis of how we became such a “successful” species for spreading so far and wide and surviving despite unbearable and almost impossible pregnancies… Next time someone asks me why I haven’t had children yet: this is the book I’m sharing.
Fair warning: on some very descriptive sections I could almost feel my Fallopian tubes cutting themselves up. I did find myself crossing my legs in imaginary pain often in the chapter that compares primate birth.
The author has such wit and humor for telling such complex stories in a very accessible way. And it’s not a “women are better than men” (or than any other gender) kind of book; it is simply that other part of the story we rarely find. This is partly because research with female bodies is just statistically more complex and it was until 2004 that—in the US at least according to the book—scientists had to start justifying why their study samples did not include women…but you can read more about that in the book. And well, many other reasons why we don’t hear that part of the story, and here it is now in “Eve”, by Dr. Cat Bohannon.
Plagued with science and a lot of wit, it is a dense but very enjoyable must-read. You’ll never see your own body the same again. And that’s a good thing.
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Thanks to @netgalley for the free eARC in exchange for my honest review.
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