All about Eve Why women belong at heart of evolution

American academic Cat Bohannon discusses her myth-busting new book about human development that has taken 10 years to write

- Katy Guest

While appearing on a podcast recently to publicise her first book, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution, Cat Bohannon found herself having to reassure the pregnant producer. In the book, which puts women back at the heart (and brain, and womb) of our evolutionary story, Bohannon describes pregnancy as "a dance between what the mother's body needs and what her hungry offspring need, with each accommodation skirting just on the edge of killing one or both of them".

At each stage, Bohannon makes clear just how unlikely human survival has been, with our narrow pelvises, huge heads, needy babies and hungry brains. And so, she argues, the innovations that have allowed our species to survive and flourish were not the spear, the wheel or the internet, but midwifery and gynaecology, wet nursing and prenatal care. Without our super-social cooperation, we'd have disappeared back in prehistoric Africa.

It's easy to understand why the producer had fallen silent. "She was eight months pregnant," Bohannon recalls. "And so, at the very end, I was like, 'You're gonna be fine! Everything's going to be great! Well, it's not going to be super fun for those few hours, and then there's motherhood, which is also complicated. But you're going to be very much alive!'" 

Eve is a hugely ambitious piece of work. It took Bohannon 10 years to research and write though, to be fair, that was at the same time as earning a PhD, living through a pandemic and having two children. The book sets out to turn our male-centric understanding of the human body, and history, on its head. Bohannon creates female characters out of our earliest common ancestors, and rewrites the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, to argue that perhaps it was women who led the development of language, tools and walking on two legs.