What a Difference a Couple Hundred Million Years Can Make

Cat Bohannon's book has a story arc. It's the arc of how we came to be what we are. It rises steadily through six chapters and then has an inflection point on page 332 of Chapter 7. After suggesting that Neanderthals possessed language, she asks whether it is language that makes us human. She answers her own question with a bold “I don't think so.” This is bold because there is wide agreement among scientists that language is what makes us special. Bohannon presses on. She wrote about the power of grammar earlier in Chapter 7, noting how it provides language with an infinitely flexible framework of cognition. “With human grammar,” she says, “we can make anything behave like an agent: a shoe can want, an eyelash can whisper.” But still no, she says, even that wouldn't have been enough. She continues, saying that there was still something, a dividing line such that “before it we were not human, and after it we were.” We became human “when a single human being told the very first story” (p. 332). I think she is on to something. More on that later.There is also a theme: “We have to put the female body in the picture. If we don't, it's not just feminism that's compromised. Modern medicine, neurobiology, paleoanthropology, even evolutionary biology all take a hit when we ignore the fact that half of us have breasts” (pp. 16–17). This theme spans the disciplines of history, anthropology, sociology, folklore, medicine, pop culture. And it is captured by a comment from Susan Sontag in her essay for Annie Leibovitz's book Women: “Any large-scale picturing of women belongs to the ongoing story of how women are presented, and how they are invited to think of themselves.” Thus, whether it is intentional or not, it raises a “question of women,” whereas “Men, unlike women, are not a work in progress” (Liebovitz & Sontag, 2000).And then there is the substance of the book, that is, the details of human female physiology. You might want to brace yourself for this one. I think I learned more new things per paragraph than I have from most other books I have ever read.I'm tempted to say that Eve is one of those “ahead of its time” books, rich with new understandings of female biology and accessible to both academicians and laypeople alike. But that would be less than accurate. Eve is something like 50 years too late! 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