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4.5 Stars

For years my husband has complained about not being able to hear dialogue in movies against the backdrop of the score and his inability to keep up with family conversations in restaurants among the ambient noise (note that we have 2 daughters, so all female). In the past I have shrugged away my irritation and told him to clean the wax out of his ears and suggested a good ENT. Well, it turns out that men's ears don't hear higher frequencies as well as women's and that their hearing loss of the higher frequencies (the range where most women speak) begins at age 25. Apparently this difference evolved as females needed to be able to hear their babies over the sounds in the canopy when they moved about. My husband thanks you, Cat Bohannon, and I have issued my apology.

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution is an evolutionary and social history through the lens of the female body. The seeds of this book were planted with Bohannon's realization that most medical research was conducted on male subjects so the differences in the female body were not taken into account. Female bodies are not just male bodies with breasts and wide hips; there are fundamental differences.

Some fascinating (to me anyway) things I learned:

Adipose tissue (fat) is an organ. Women's fat and men's fat are different. Each fat deposit in our body has a different function. One example is that the fat in women's hips, thighs, and buttocks is full of long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids like those found in fish oil. At puberty, females begin storing these fats (which we can't obtain enough of from our daily diet) in order to nourish the brain and retinas of a fetus during a pregnancy and breastfeeding.

Most of us know about the immune system benefits that come with breastfeeding. Those babies who are breastfed get an added benefit. While the milk flows out of the nipple there is an upsuck of the baby's saliva. "Depending on what happens to be in baby's spit that day, the mother's breasts will change the particular composition of her milk. Her milk will actually change to include an agent to fight a specific pathogen or to include hormones to soothe a stressed baby.

Pregnant women with malaria are three to four times more likely to suffer from the most severe forms of the disease, and of those who do, 50 percent will die. . . . The entire reason the United States built the CDC [and located it in Atlanta] is that malaria was rampant throughout the American south. Malaria was finally eradicated in the United States in 1951." My footnote (not in the book): In 2023, for the first time since then, there have been 9 reported cases of locally acquired malaria in the U.S.--7 in FL, 2 in TX, and 1 in MD. Climate change?

Why do women live long after they are no longer reproduce and live longer and more healthfully than men? Bohannon posits that "whatever helps female bodies live on may simply benefit male bodies less, and losing more males may not cost primate societies that much. . . . From a scientific perspective, males don't really need to live as long as females to perpetuate the species." As to the why, Bohannon suggests that "Before we could write stuff down, it was especially important to have someone in the group who could remember earlier crises. It's usually not hard to find someone who can remember a difficult thing that happened ten years ago. It's much harder to find someone who remembers a difficult thing that happened forty years ago, or how, precisely, the community managed to find a workaround." This knowledge combined with gynecological and midwifery skills were the evolutionary pressures that selected women to live longer.

Where I feel Bohannon is less sure footed is in her hypothesis over the evolution of sexism. Do read her thoughts and come to your own conclusions.

Bohannon is an excellent writer--clear, engaging, informative, and entertaining. There is so much more than these bits that I have shared, and all of it is fascinating. If the topic interests you, by all means take the plunge and read this book!

Publication 2023