[Cat Bohannon’s book, “Eve,” looks at the way women’s
bodies evolved, and how a focus on male subjects in science has left
women “under-studied and under-cared for.” ]
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PUTTING WOMEN AT THE CENTER OF HUMAN EVOLUTION  
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Sarah Lyall
September 11, 2023
New York Times
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_ Cat Bohannon’s book, “Eve,” looks at the way women’s bodies
evolved, and how a focus on male subjects in science has left women
“under-studied and under-cared for.” _

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The author Cat Bohannon was a preteen in Atlanta in the 1980s when she
saw the film “2001: A Space Odyssey” for the first time. As she
took in its famous opening scene, in which a bunch of apes picks up a
bunch of bones and quickly begins using them to hit each other,
Bohannon was struck by the sheer maleness of the moment.

“I thought, ‘Where are the females in this story?’” Bohannon
said recently, imagining what those absent females might have been up
to at that particular time. “It’s like, ‘Oh, sorry, I see
you’re doing something really important with a rock. I’m just
going to go over there behind that hill and quietly build the future
of the species in my womb.”

That realization was just one of what Bohannon, 44, calls “a
constellation of moments” that led her to write her new book,
“Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human
Evolution.”

A page-turning whistle-stop tour of mammalian development that begins
in the Jurassic Era, “Eve” recasts the traditional story of
evolutionary biology by placing women at its center.

The idea is that by examining how women evolved differently from men,
Bohannon argues, we can “provide the latest answers to women’s
most basic questions about their bodies.” These include, she says:
Why do women menstruate? Why do they live longer? And what is the
point of menopause?

These are timely questions. Thanks to regulations established in the
1970s, clinical trials in the United States have typically used mostly
male subjects, from mice to humans. (This is known as “the male
norm.”) Though that changed somewhat in 1994, when the National
Institutes of Health updated its rules, even the new protocols are
replete with loopholes. For example: “From 1996 to 2006, more than
79 percent of animal studies published in the scientific journal Pain
included only male subjects,” she writes.That gave rise to the
misconception that “being female is just a minor tweak on a Platonic
form,” Bohannon notes in the book, and has had profound, and
damaging, implications for how medicine is practiced. As she points
out in “Eve,” antidepressants and pain medications are considered
gender-neutral, despite evidence that they affect women differently
than they do men. And it was only in 1999 that researchers began
testing sex differences in the use of general anesthesia —
discovering, as it happened, that “women wake up faster than men,
regardless of their age, weight, or the dosage they’ve been
given.”

“Women’s bodies have been under-studied and under-cared for,”
Bohannon said, speaking via Zoom from her house in Seattle. “When we
put the female body back in the frame, even people who don’t have
female bodies have a better of idea of where we all stand in this huge
evolutionary story.”

Understanding “the biology of sex differences is going to help all
bodies,” she added, including those of cisgender men and of trans
men and women. “In the evolutionary sphere, diversity is a feature,
not a bug.”

Another impetus for the book came in 2012 when Bohannon, then a
graduate student at Columbia, watched a different movie: Ridley
Scott’s “Prometheus,” a prequel to “Alien.” In one scene, an
archaeologist, played by Noomi Rapace, asks her spaceship’s
“surgery pod” to help her remove the hideous alien squid with
which she’s been involuntarily impregnated.

“Error,” the machine says. “This medpod is calculated for male
patients only.” As risible as that was to contemplate — who sends
highly-trained scientists into space along with medical equipment that
works on only some of them? — it was all too familiar to Bohannon.

“When I got home from the movie theater, I realized we needed a kind
of user’s manual for the female mammal,” Bohannon writes in
“Eve.” “Something that would tear down the male norm and put
better science in place.”

Bohannon’s book might be brimming with science, but it’s written
with a lay audience in mind. “While it is true that not everybody
works around the sciences, everybody lives in a body,” she said.
“How your lived experience of being freakin’ born and living your
life is absolutely authentic and true and authoritative, and you know
better than anyone in the world what it’s been like to live in your
body.”

The book is engaging, playful, erudite, discursive and rich with
detail. It traces the history of women’s defining features to their
origins — a series of Eves, as Bohannon puts it — going back 205
million years. Her first Eve, a small furry creature that looked a bit
like a weasel and a bit like a mouse, belonged to the genus
Morganucodon. Affectionately referred to as “Morgie” by Bohannon,
who paints a vivid picture of her life among the Jurassic beasts 200
million years ago, she was the first mammal to nurse her young.

“Eve” is also replete with interesting, far-afield facts, many
tucked inside footnotes. We learn, for instance, that the
British-Indian scientist J.B.S. Haldane, who coined the word
“clone,” once composed a scientific paper from the confines of a
trench in France, where he was stationed during World War I. (One of
his co-authors was killed.)

We learn that the apes on “2001” were played by French mimes. And
we learn that one of Bohannon’s ex-boyfriends, she writes, “lived
alone with 12 guitars, a water bed and an old poster of Tori Amos.”

“Eve” is hard to summarize because it encompasses many fields —
evolutionary biology, physiology, paleoanthropology and genetics, to
name a few — and it is equally hard to pin down its author. The book
may have taken Bohannon a decade to write, but it was a decade in
which she also earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University on the
evolution of narrative and cognition; got married; moved to Seattle;
and had two children, a process she wryly describes as “a
reproductive journey.”

She was born in Atlanta. Her parents — a psychology professor and a
pianist — divorced when she was young, and her early life was
restless and peripatetic, with her interests careering between the
sciences and the arts.

While a student at Butler University in Indianapolis, Bohannon
temporarily dropped out to join the Revolutionary Anarchist Youth
Group in western Massachusetts, and eventually studied poetry with the
British poet Andrew Motion at the University of East Anglia.

After a temporary move to Marseille, France and an equally temporary
engagement to a French Moroccan biologist, Bohannon relocated to New
York and joined several bands, playing the keyboard and guitar. She
later enrolled in an M.F.A. program at the University of Arizona and
married and divorced a musician. (After the marriage broke up, she
said, she lived for three months in her car in a parking lot near the
University of Arizona football stadium.) She wrote a lot of poetry,
“mostly about science or using scientific literature,” she
recalled.

She then went to Columbia, earning an M.F.A. in creative writing
before embarking on her Ph.D. Her thesis involved writing computer
programs that “analyzed parts of speech in many thousands of novels
over the last 400 years in the English language, and treated them as
my subject pool to ask cognitive questions,” she explained.

At one point, Bohannon also worked as the unofficial poet-in-residence
at Plastination City in Dalian, China, where bodies were being
preserved and displayed as art by plastination’s inventor, the
German anatomist Dr. Gunther von Hagens. “Shipwreck,”
[[link removed]] an essay she wrote on von
Hagens’s work, was published in The Georgia Review in 2005. It
piqued the interest of the literary agent Elyse Cheney, who took her
on as a client.

Advait Jukar, a paleontologist at the University of Arizona who worked
with Bohannon on the paleontological component of “Eve,” called it
a “remarkable and important book — one of the first times we’re
telling the evolutionary story of women to the general public through
this lens.”

“Cat has dabbled in a lot of things throughout her life and she’s
written a lot of fascinating articles,” he added. “But her ability
to talk to people like me, and to talk to molecular biologists and
physiologists and geneticists and piece all that together in a way
that is both entertaining and accessible, is a rare gift.

“She’s got a beautiful mind,” he said.

_Sarah Lyall [[link removed]] is a writer at
large, working for a variety of desks including Sports, Culture, Media
and International. Previously she was a correspondent in the London
bureau, and a reporter for the Culture and Metro desks. More about
Sarah Lyall [[link removed]]_

_A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 17, 2023,
Section AR, Page 60 of the New York edition with the
headline: What Eve Can Teach Us About Women. Order Reprints
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* Evolution
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* human evolution
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* Women
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* biology
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