Did Women Drive Evolution?

This week on the Next Big Idea Podcast: Cat Bohannon on how the female body drove 200 million years of human evolution. Listen on Apple or Spotify and share your thoughts in the comments below.

I think it’s fair to say that, as a species, we are narcissists. We are really impressed by ourselves. We relish the story of human evolution — much as a sentimental person loves to share pictures from their childhood. Wasn’t I cute? Look at this one!

This might help explain why Yuval Noah Harari’s book, Sapiens, which tells the scientific story of our origin story with the simplicity of, say, the Bible, is among the best selling books in history. We had the pleasure of having Yuval as a guest on the show, and I asked him about this nostalgia we have for our collective childhood. I asked if he felt it, too. If part of him longed for the ancient world. He told me, "I think in a way almost all of us have this longing. Something inside us remembers the stone age and sometimes wants to go back there."

I feel this … a desire to know what it felt like to live immersed in the environment in which all of our instincts and senses evolved. Our sight and sound and pattern recognition engaged in noting the bends of grass to track an animal, our prodigious endurance put to the test as we run it down, our astonishing hand-eye coordination and trajectory calculations employed in the throwing of a spear. Of course, it's not lost on me that I am experiencing this desire right now while reclined in an ergonomic chair, enjoying a perfectly toasted everything bagel and cream cheese, in a 72 degree climate controlled room, a condition inconceivable to our “lucky” ancestors.

We've discussed our ancient past in some of my favorite episodes of the show, like with David Wengrow, whose book The Dawn of Everything opened my eyes to the incredible breadth of human social structures … with Christopher Ryan, who connected all of our modern troubles to our departure from our ancestral state in Civilized to Death … and with Edward Slingerland, who talked about the first human keg party, and the possibility that the desire to drink together drove the advent of farming.

These guests, you may have noticed, are all men. Unfortunately a preponderance of the tellers of the human story have been. As a result, the protagonists of their tales are mostly dudes, too – cro magnon Bob the Builders swinging ancient hammers.

But an exciting new book came out recently which sets out to change all this — EVE: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon.

Cat, who has a PhD from Columbia in the evolution of narrative and cognition, makes the long overdue case that since the dawn of mammals — animals with mammaries — ancestral women have played an absolutely critical role in the shaping of the human story. From early tool development to language to midwifery and birth control, women were at the center of the story.?

And this journey has lots to tell us about our current condition – the bodies we have today, and the complexity of our relationships. Indeed, the story of our evolution is written on our bodies, So we can look down and around and engage in one of our favorite activities — admiring the scrapbook of our miraculously, beautiful species, if we don’t say so ourselves.

Give it a listen on Apple or Spotify and share your thoughts in the comments below!