Eve (Adapted for Young Adults): How the Female Body Shaped Human Evolution

by Cat Bohannon

The groundbreaking New York Times bestseller is now adapted for young adults!  This is the 200-million-year story of how the female body gave rise to the human species and forever shaped life on Earth and what that means for us in the future.

Why do women live longer than men? Why do girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet? Is the female brain "wired differently?" These questions and common debates around scientific claims are thoughtfully examined in this adaptation perfect for young people.

This brand-new adaptation is a friendly, funny, and engaging read. It explores teen related topics such as mental health and the biology behind it, including insights on how adolescent brains are going through all kinds of changes, and shifting hormones. Author Cat Bohannon explains the roots of sexism and shows how, though it may have even served some evolutionary purpose long ago, it no longer serves us today, and it’s high time we leave it in the past.

Filled with amazing stories of both past and present, Eve will delight any young reader looking to understand the body—its amazing history, its wondrous capability, its oddities and mysteries, and its relevance to so many issues captivating contemporary thought and discussion.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

432 pages, Hardcover

Published February 25, 2025

About the author

Researcher, scholar, writer, freak. Cat completed her PhD in 2022 at Columbia University, where she studied the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Scientific American, Science, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Lapham's Quarterly, The Georgia Review, and on The Story Collider. Eve is her first book and a New York Times bestseller. She lives in the U.S. with her partner and two offspring.

Reviews

[P. Rohrer-Walsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have several issues with this book:

First, there are not footnotes. But when you read the entire book, you'll see that there's a website with the footnotes. There are pages listed but I couldn't see how they corresponded to the text. I know Bohannon said she was saving the publisher pages of works citied, but given the fact this is based (assumingly) on scientific research, this is sloppy and lazy. IMO

Second, there's a very brief refence to those born with sexually ambiguous traits. This needs far more attention. See Alicia Roth Weigel's The Inverse Cowgirl for an enlightening memoir of this subject.

Third, I assume this book was written before Roe vs. Wade was overturned. Why else such a hopeful conclusion instead of a call to action?

quotes:

I know some people still struggle with this idea, but most of the scientific community agrees that biological sex is fundamentally separate from human gender identity. The belief that the sex typical features of a person's body inevitably assign them a gender identity and behavior to match is sometimes called biology ISM or, more broadly from a gender essentialism. Gender essentialism is a natural extension of sexism; Societies that form deep cultural beliefs about what a gender “should be” also tend to believe that a person is one of two genders from birth depending on how their body looks. 2
in the Biological Sciences, there's still such a thing as the “male norm” (also called “male bias”). The male body is what gets studied in the lab. Unless we're specifically researching ovaries, uteri, estrogens, or breasts, the girls aren't there. Think about the last time you heard about a scientific study--some article about a new window into obesity, or pain tolerance, or memory, or aging. That study likely didn't include any female subjects. That's as true for mice as it is for dogs, pigs, monkeys, and all too often humans. By the time a clinical trial for a new medication starts testing on human subjects, it might not have been tested on female animals at all. 3M
many researchers default to male subjects for practical reasons: it's hard to control for the effects of female fertility cycles, particularly in mammals. A complex soup of hormones floods their bodies regularly; Male sex hormones seem more stable period a good scientific experiment aims to be simple. As a scientist and a prominent lab once told me, using males “just makes it easier to do clean science.” The variables are easier to control, making the data more interpretable with less work, and the results more meaningful. Taking the time to control for the female reproductive cycle is considered difficult and expensive; The ovary itself is thought of as a “confounding factor.” So, unless the scientist is specifically asking a question about females, the female sex is left out of the equation. Experiments run faster, papers come out sooner, and researchers are more likely to get grant funding and 10 year. 4
Most of the time, female gluteofemoral fat resists being metabolized. These areas are the first places women gain weight and the last places they lose it. As such, these are popular sites for women to get liposuction, with tummy tucks close second period 9
Most Women's bodies begin preparing for pregnancy and childhood, not because it's a woman's destiny to be a mother, but because human pregnancy sucks, and our bodies have evolved ways to help us survive it. 10
On top of that commodity average adult humans metabolism is massively higher than a chimps in part because our brains are essentially supercomputers that run on fat and sugar. Feeding and maintaining these things is neither easy nor straightforward. Betting on a big brain, in evolutionary terms, is actually not a safe bet. 239
This it's also true in classroom settings. But because speech in many such places is controlled by formal constraints, like being called on by a teacher, the likelihood of your being called on is the biggest predictor of how many words you'll speak. As a rule, girls are called on less in classroom settings, and as a result they speak less than boys. And yet we seem to believe the opposite. That belief is so deep, it defies reality: when listening to recorded conversations, we're pretty good estimating how much time each person speaks if both participants are the same sex. But when we listen to a conversation between a man and a woman, we usually think the woman talks more than she actually does--even if she's reading a script with the same number of words as she'd spoken opposite another female. 247
Only 20% of the people who buy and read novels are men. 248
Men and their lives dramatically more often than women. It's not exactly the battle of the sexes you'd want to win, but in this arena men are far ahead. There are a few ways of interpreting this. More women than men suffer from clinical depression, but most depressed people are not suicidal. It is, however, a dangerous comorbidity: people who become suicidal after suffering from depression may be more likely to act on suicidal thoughts. Still, women are significantly less likely to attempt suicide than men. 256-7
So, if there is a Female Brain, It may be more prone to depression and anxiety in certain kinds of self harm, but it's far less vulnerable to catastrophic failures like suicide. 258
The human brain reaches peak synaptic density--when the most neurons are the most wired to other neurons--when we're around two. That's part of why toddlers starts seeming so much smarter all of a sudden. It's also part of why they throw so many tantrums calling the emotional centers of the brain are more densely connected to every other part of the brain, the theory goes, and once you start a kind of exponential emotional “cascade,” it’s hard to stop. 267
The Brain of a standard toddler is effectively rewiring itself, dramatically reshaping material it just built. One theory, in fact, for the development of childhood autism has to do with this pruning process--some scientists think certain kinds of autistic brains over prune and under prune some regions, leaving others alone. 267
While female and male brains prune themselves roughly the same amount, male brains prune later and faster. 269
During the toddler transition, the adolescent struggle, or any of those long years in between, the children's brains are doing the most is social learning: paying extremely careful attention to what others want, trying to predict those wants, and likewise trying to figure out ways of quickly communicating their own wants two others. 270
And theory of mind--building a model of another's internal cognitive state, mapping out its potential desires, and communicating accordingly--it's something human beings are extraordinarily good at period 270
Not unlike adolescence, however, those brain changes do seem to come with a short term functional cost: problems with short term memory, emotional regulation, and sleep dysregulation (not simply from an uncomfortable body, but also from hormone levels rising and falling in the brain itself.) … But For those who give birth, human mother's brain, as exhausted and buggy as it feels to use, uniquely adapts to succeed at this extremely difficult task, meaning it unleashes quite a lot of how we've gone about a day and learns new ways to do things. 274
There are essentially 2 networks the brain uses to deal with challenges and threats. The 1st is the sympathetic-adrenal-medullary axis (SAM). We mostly use SAM in classic fight-or-flight moments, when things happen fast. Say you hear a tsunami alarm and realize you have to run. Your brain sends a signal to your adrenal medula to pump epinephrine throughout your body. That's the same stuff ER doctors use to restart your heart after a heart attack. 279-280
The second network for stress is the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA). The HPA axis is what triggers the release of cortisol—the classic “stress molecule.” You always have a bit of cortisol in your body. If you need to be vigilant, cortisol is how your body is going to pull it off. But when cortisol levels are high for a long time, they disrupt the sleep cycle. They screw with digestion. They make short- and long-term memory wonky. Cortisol suppresses the immune system. It hardens arteries. A little bit of stress is good; a lot of stress is famously bad. The HPA axis is something our brains us in longer, grinding “life stress” periods. 280
As for HY babies who went through gender reassignment as newborns because of “ambiguous genitalia”? 284
That’s the core of what sexism is: a massive set of rules that work to control reproduction. 381
So we keep tweaking the settings. In fact, it’s one of the first things any human culture looks to in times of cultural flux. The first thing ISIS does when it take over a town? It forces locals to serve as religious police and sends them on patrol to make sure women cover their bodies when men are around. And when France gets especially nervous about the Muslim population, the government reestablishes the country’s “Frenchness” by making rules against women wearing hijabs on the beach. But it’s not just a modern thing, and if we pull the camera back a bit, it really has nothing to do with Islam. European colonists made a big fuss about “covering up” the bodies of Native American women. Aztecs spread their own sex standards to the people they conquered, too. Throughout history, when cultures with different sex rules come in contact , some rules get abandoned and others get violently enforced. 384-5
Forty-eight of fifty states in the United States allow child marriage with the “permission” of the parents—a legally sanctioned form of child abuse. Unfortunately, the United States allows parents to do all sorts of things to their children, usually under the mantle of “religion” or “cultural preference.” For example, in twenty-one of our fifty states, it is legal to force one’s daughter—no matter her age—to go through with a pregnancy when she doesn’t want to or, even worse, is too young to be able to understand the physical and existential consequences of doing so. 393
As we learned in the “brain” chapter, brain tissue uses the most energy, pound for pound, of any tissue in the human body. And it’s fairly fragile stuff. 404
The payoffs were enormous. Islam's golden age produced algebra, chemistry, the magnetic compass, better modes of the navigation, and all sorts of advanced with in medicine and biology. While Europe was busy telling itself the plague was caused by the evil fog, Islamic doctors had already figured out the copper and silver instruments were best for surgery. The metals are anti microbial. Philosophy also flourished, with new ideas about humane government and social interdependence, many of which directly influenced the rise of the European enlightenment. The golden age of Islam, in other words, produced one of the most intellectual, egalitarian, cosmopolitan, and profoundly influential societies of the time period and women were right there at the fore, Contributing to its success. The slow decline of that civilization also happened to start with Islam absorb byzantium and became more influenced by western thought, including the increased inclusion of women and girls that were so popular in Persia, and the de emphasis of the importance of education and worldliness of anyone who happened to be female. 406-7
Roughly 65,000,000 adult Arab people are illiterate right now, of which 2/3 are women. 407
Supporting those stories is our shared switchboard of cultural norms: the things cultures do in common that help everyone signal to one another, “We belong here.” Generally speaking, the more common the switchboard, the stronger a local culture becomes. That’s a lot of what sociologists mean when they talk about “social cohesion”—it’s what happens when all of the common features of the switchboard, and all of the common stories, build this crazy human thing we call cultural identity. It’s the main reason we don’t dissolve into mutually warring family clans—we usefully trick ourselves into thinking people who aren’t related to us are actually our kin. It’s not just humanity’s crappy reproductive system driving sexism, in other words. It’s also our deep social drive. It’s hard to pit two of your most valuable and unique behaviors against each other. Though its evolutionary roots run deep, gynecology is uniquely human. So is our kinship behavior. Shared social rules are one of the main ways cultures build extendable identity. And sharing sex rules—not just being sexist, but being sexist in the same way as other members of our cultural group—is one of the big ways we reinforce group membership. We like the feeling of being with people who “share our values.” 409
Despite today’s sexist backlashes, I still think we’re moving irresistibly toward our species’ collective future: one of true egalitarianism between the sexes, supported by better gynecological medicine. We’re taking control of our reproductive systems. We’re deciding how we want to become pregnant, and when, and with whom, and we’re going to have a more even distribution between the sexes when it comes to childcare. 411 ?????????
The big assholes do enormous damage, but it’s the little assholes that chip away at every citizen’s confidence that they can rely on the other people to do what needs doing to make a country work. 413
The more clannish you become, the more corruption spreads, the more institutions break down—weakened by a lack of funding and public confidence—the more vulnerable you are to the big assholes. The world-changing assholes. The demagogues. The autocrats. The monsters. Monsters don’t have a very good record of bolstering human progress. Monsters who are given social power set us back, not just through death and destruction, but because recovering from monsters after they die is really hard. Assad is going to die one day, more than likely safe and warm in a bed, tucked into sheets with t really high thread count. But Syria? They won’t recover in our lifetime. Because all these beautiful institutions we build are fragile. Unless we work together, collectively, to reinforce them, we’ll lose them to any given asteroid and asshole. So really, when I think how to answer that question at the start of this chapter, it seems to me that loving someone isn’t the best thing a woman can do. The best thing any human being can do requires all of our uniquely human traits: our extended kinship behavior, narrative building, and problem solving. The best thing we do is create institutions to support and protect those fragile extended bonds. And those institutions, like them or not, are what allow us to overcome our less desirable behaviors: territoriality, sexism. They are the way we push beyond the limitations of our bodies’ evolution. They are the means by which we become truly free. 414
And I wish I could tell her, as I will tell my own children someday, that every power men have ever had over women is something we gave them. We just forgot. We forgot we can stop. 416

[YSBR · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this adaptation, young readers can access a slightly shorter version of Bohannon’s 2023 bestseller about evolutionary biology. In a conversational and entertaining voice, the author presents her argument that the understudied female body, rather than the male, has played a greater role in human evolutionary breakthroughs. Bohannon examines a series of these pivotal developments by introducing us to several prehistoric “Eves” who nursed their babies, carried their offspring in utero, advanced visual perception, or used tools, among other physical advancements. As in the original book, each section opens with an elegant black-and-white pencil sketch of the Eve under consideration, who range from the primitive weasel-like Morganucodon all the way to Homo sapiens. Readers interested in the male-centric nature of medicine and the absence of female bodies in the story of evolution will find this engaging examination provocative. Liberal use of personal anecdotes, pop culture references, and links to the historical record will allow readers to see Bohannon’s observations in the real world, which will certainly help keep teen readers engaged in her sometimes lengthy narrative. In addition to the fanciful Eve drawings, the book includes snappy topic headings on light gray bars and the occasional graphic (for example, a side view diagram of the olfactory bulb or a timeline contrasting the brain capacity of human ancestors). At 416 pages of text (vs. the adult version’s 437 pages), this is a thorough and eye-opening treatment for teens fascinated in the topics of anatomy, behavior, and gender. Link to complete review: https://ysbookreviews.wordpress.com/2...

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

After pushing Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution on any and every person who would listen, I was ecstatic to see a young adults adaptation was going to be published.

With Eve, my recommendation always came with the caveat that while it's certainly long, it's well worth it. I just might start recommending this adaptation first - no matter who to - to dip their toes into the beauty that is Cat Bohannan's work here. I'd find it hard to believe that adults able to comprehend the original version wouldn't want to immediately pick it up and dive in.

The addition of adolescent-specific knowledge is icing on the cake! Growing up I was constantly seeking out a resource like this! I can't be trusted on the internet. Side tracked, next thing you know you're doing down a completely irrelevant rabbit hole. Save yourself and your kids and your students and whoever from that with this book. I sound like an infomercial, but the praise is all earned.

I can't wait to purchase a trophy copy of this to put right next to the OG.

{Thank you bunches to NetGalley, Cat Bohannon and Bright Matter Books for the DRC in exchange for my honest review!}

[JessOfAwesome · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good book with lots of valuable information and rare study into the female body. This combines scientific, religious, and medical studies in a way that, no matter which you value more, you still get the others. The information is not contraditive and has a point in each part of the book.
I'd rate it higher if this was not meant to be an adaption for "young adults." There is so much information here that it can be hard for adults in general to get through all of it, let alone older teens and young adults. I do believe it could have been condensed and simplified a lot more. The addition of a few illustrations is nice, but there could have been more as seen in other adaptations for young adults.
This is an ARC review.

[Donna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many times, biology classes focus on males and ignore or minimize females. This book makes up for that by teaching about evolution and female bodies. Here is the information I should have learned in school about my own body.

This should be a required text for advanced high school biology classes, so that students learn about female bodies in addition to the standard focus on male bodies. Intersex people should be included more as well.

I found it difficult to put this book down, and I've been recommending it to many people.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book!

[H. Woodward · Rating 3 out of 5]

There’s a lot of information in this book. But, it would be wildly inappropriate to have in a classroom, unless maybe you’re a health teacher? I’d still use it for reference and not put it on a student shelf. There’s a lot of evolutionary biology here, too. It’s not the easiest reading, I know this is the adapted for young adults version, but it’s still, a lot! Recently, the adapted for ya versions have been so great. Usually even better than the ‘grown up’ versions because they include pictures, maps, charts. This one just doesn’t seem like it will be very widely read by the target audience.

[Lori · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would be interested to compare this to the original version because I did not feel like the subject matter was dumbed down at all. The author had some very interesting conclusions, but I do think that the argument could be made that the author was biased at least based on this version. I received an ARC of this work from Netgalley for my honest review.