IN THE OPENING SCENE OF “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a pack of male hominids gather, screech and chase one another around Stanley Kubrick’s set. Then one picks up an animal bone and starts dominating. Humanity has dawned. Ta-da!
If this tableau is newly familiar, it may be because Greta Gerwig restaged it in “Barbie,” imagining the moment with a doll instead of a weapon. But when Cat Bohannon, a narrative theorist and poet, rewrites the same scene, she has grander ambitions. She wants to change how we understand all of human evolution — to tear our eyes away from “the clever ape — always male” — and force us to consider the female of the species. How did our needs, and our anatomy, spark pivotal breakthroughs? What about the Dawn of Woman? That question animates the high-velocity, high-impact “Eve,” part owner’s manual for the female body “from tits to toes”; part sweeping saga of mammalian history; and part clapback against the tendency of much evolutionary thought to place men, and their furry mancestors, at the center of the action.
Bohannon has different protagonists in mind, and she whips through the millennia sketching early “Eves” who may have gotten us where we are now, from a lactating “weird little weasel-beast” of dinosaur times to Ardipithecus ramidus, the first known ape to walk upright. While some scholars, “waxing poetic about ancient male hunters,” chalk the evolution of bipedalism up to males needing to use their hands to secure food, she believes that the female “Ardi,” responsible for baby care, would have been motivated to venture out for food herself. Similarly, one popular theory of language development holds that men evolved to shout at one another while hunting. But Bohannon uses everything from the brain’s patterns of learning to mothers’ ability to speak in infant-friendly tones to make the case that language was invented between baby and caretaker.
And if you’re talking about pivotal evolutionary breakthroughs, consider nursing. Not only does the infant’s mouth prompt the mother’s body to make milk, but research shows that the milk is a magically on-demand concoction, “co-produced” in response to signals that the baby sends by flowing its saliva into the mother’s nipple to indicate it is stressed or sick and in need of a specific recipe.
Our bodies did all this because it was necessary, Bohannon argues. The thing our species has always needed most is the survival of its babies — and the creatures who bear and breastfeed them. “In the mammalian game, you can always make more boys,” she notes. “The loss of a healthy, young female is incredibly expensive.” (In this view of evolution, in other words: She’s Eve. He’s just Ken.)
At the heart of this argument is understanding the gauntlet that is human birth: Between our especially ravenous foetuses and the challenge of pushing a big-brained baby out of a birth canal made smaller by walking upright, humans are “demonstrably worse” at reproducing than most other mammals. And yet, somehow, there are eight billion Homo sapiens on Earth.
How did we do it? Via “our ancestors’ most important invention,” she says. “It wasn’t stone tools. It wasn’t fire.” Rather, the “very reason we’ve managed to succeed as a species was … gynaecology.”