Book Review: Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon, Knoph, 2023

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

by Cat Bohannon, Knoph, 2023

Book reviewed by Nell Marshall

Eve is a brilliant combination of research and speculation on the evolution of women’s bodies. In her introduction Bohannon writes: “I will examine current debate around how the evolution of those features shapes women’s lives today, considering the current science”. She does just that.

There is not just one Eve in our human origin story. There are many over time. Since soft tissue is almost never preserved in the fossil record, we have very little to go on. Bohannon has organized her chapters in the chronological order that the various features appear in human evolution, from the earliest Eves to our present. The chapter titles are: Milk, Womb, Perception, Legs, Tools, Brain, Voice, Menopause, Love. All the discussions range widely across disciplines and topics. There is so much here it is difficult to convey the vast range.

The first chapter, Milk, begins with one of our first Eves, Morgie, a small marsupial-like animal who laid eggs and leaked her milk into her fur.  “And as far as the latest scientific research can determine, we make milk because we used to lay eggs and, weirdly, because we have a long-standing love affair with millions of bacteria. Both can be traced back to Morgie.”

Throughout the book Bohannon goes on to discuss biochemistry, function, research, medical and social history, and the evolutionary role of women’s bodies. Way too much of the research is very recent, the questions haven’t even been asked. Her discussion of LGBTQ issues and bodies, here and in several chapters, is among the most humane and inclusive discussions I have read on these issues. Her discussions make sense in evolutionary and biological terms.

Bohannon’s writing is entertaining, fast paced, rigorously researched and footnoted with often witty footnotes. She reads the audiobook in the same easy style. She is thoughtful with a touch of humor. She has a personal style and is openly involved in the discussion of any implications of the research she writes about.

Here are a few more quotes from Eve from the first chapter, Milk, and milk’s evolutionary role in developing and fostering our bodies and great brains:

“Because we’re mammals, the nipple is one of our first lines of communication.”

“Mothers’ bodies tailor milk’s contents for the needs of their offspring through a complex communication system between mouth and breast. Babies’ personalities are shaped by its particular makeup, are soothed by its fats and sugars and hormones, their guts purged and recolonized by friendly bacteria. Milk is something we do as much as something we make. It has evolved to be social.”

“Human infants drink about three cups of breast milk a day in their first year of life. That’s clearly a greater opportunity for biochemical signaling than nearly any other pathway.”

“In fact, human cities may be Morgie’s greatest legacy. Without wet nurses, city life might never have taken off the way it did.”

“...it would seem Hammurabi had a hell of a lot of babies on his hands. No wonder regulations for wet-nursing made it into his written law.”

All the chapters in Eve are equally wide ranging as the first chapter on milk.

All of this is just a tiny glimpse of the range and imagination of Bohannon’s approach. There is so much more extending out in all directions. Bohannon discusses the role and structure of nipples, including men’s nipples. She discusses the history and role of wet nursing and its evolutionary role. She examines the role and level of cortisol in breast milk. She discusses the structure of breasts and reasons for shape and size. She also discusses the history of people discussing these.

From the Brain chapter she writes:

“We’re terribly impressed with our brain. I’d argue we’re in love with it. Which is to say, the human brain is in love with itself. If there’s a single, physical trait that most scientists agree delineates humans from the other apes, it’s our huge, lumpy, terribly intelligent brain.”

In further chapters she covers a vast range of information. These next points are particularly noteworthy. Critical to developing our great brains is the extra layer of fat on women’s hips and thighs; and motherese, the universal way mothers speak to infants and young children, critical to the development of brains and language.

“As it turns out, women’s fat isn’t the same as men’s. Each fat deposit on our body is a little bit different, <*6> but women’s hip, buttock, and upper thigh fat, or “gluteofemoral” fat, is chock-full of unusual lipids: long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, or LC-PUFAs. (Think omega-3. Think fish oil.) Our livers are bad at making these kinds of fats from scratch, so we need to get most of them from our diet. And bodies that can become pregnant need them so they can make baby brains and retinas.”

She discusses the development of language and how we pass it from generation to generation.

“So the male narrative of the evolution of human language misses the point.” …

‘… 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. <*10> 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.”

“Mom, in other words, is at least half of how language happens. And she’s not passive. Not at all. Human mothers have evolved to be language engines—prodigious users and teachers of language.”

Why should people in the internal arts community be interested in this book? For me it’s obvious, but just in case here are a few thoughts. Bohannon writes about the physical nature of our bodies and the state of our understanding of our bodies. We are interested in how our bodies work and why, and what to do to keep our bodies working. Knowing the hows and whys helps us figure out the whats.

Several decades ago, I was taking a Tai Chi class with a friend. She and her husband had been trying to have a baby and she had already suffered a couple of miscarriages. She succeeded in getting pregnant again and soon after quit the Tai chi class. She said she was afraid all that yang energy was not good, not safe for her pregnancy. She later had a healthy baby.

I have often wondered about her perception and the role of yang energy. In her case I wonder how much of that yang energy came from the class and how much from the form, what was the difference? I do not doubt her decision was right for her at that time, that she was listening to her body. How do the balances play out in women's bodies?  There are contradictions of course, as with everything in life. In Tai Chi, the more you can relax, the better you can develop and direct chi. I still wonder about yang energy and the differences in women’s bodies and what it means for developing and directing chi and the practice of Tai Chi.

In the world we have created, organized along patriarchal lines, threatened by the destruction of climate change and the growth and accessibility of weapons of mass destruction, with the power of the state used to threaten women’s health and kill us, we have to wonder about just how useful our great brains are. Can we, should we, throw off the patriarchal systems that created this and try another approach? What approach? How do we get there? Can we get there without breaking more than we mend? Will our great brains help us?

People of all cultures feel and use chi.  The Chinese have named it, studied and cultivated it. It is present and moves through all of us all the time throughout the world.  I’ve been thinking about how chi is used and manifests among different people.  The most obvious and visible is group chi, you find it in dance, in church services, in sporting events both for fandom and participants. You find it in parties, rallies, assemblies, meetings, classes, everywhere people are together, and particularly when they are moving or singing in unison. When people move together in unison the group chi swells and vibrates.  In the recent World Cup, I watched some fans from Senegal performing a group dance in unison in the stands, all moving as one. It was so smooth, graceful and powerful, I knew as I watched that Senegal would win that match, and it did. The dance appeared to me as a manifestation of the chi of that whole moment in that place, moving through the dancers, generated and cultivated in the dance.

Are women’s dances around the world a kind of women’s group qigong? Many look that way to me. The only qigong form I know of that addresses the specific nature of women’s bodies is Daisy Lee’s Radiant Lotus, a beautiful, joyful form. I see it as a breakthrough moment, opening new worlds that are as old as life itself.

There is much in Eve to inspire an infinity of questions, an infinity of paths of inquiry, of matters to ponder and directions to go, in the internal arts as well as in all of life. Very little is known to date. The male norm prevails in scientific research and in the scholarship of chi. Many paths lie open before us, many are waiting to be noticed, much less explored.