Cat Bohannon (Penguin Books)
DID humans evolve to be sexist? Without contraception, suppressing women may have been an effective way of keeping birth rates under control. But any “benefits” of sexism (painful as that is to write) may have been overtaken by the knowledge that culminated in gynaecology, as humans learned to help each other through the process of big brains travelling through narrow pelvises. Perhaps our ancestors also used that knowledge to time births with harvests or help mothers and babies survive if plentiful environments gave rise to mass mating.
These are some of the – occasionally contentious – points argued by Cat Bohannon, an author and researcher, in Eve: How the female body drove 200 million years of human evolution, with this period covering the time since the emergence of the earliest known mammals.
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While women now wear many hats – often juggling parenthood with careers – prehistoric roles are thought to have generally been more traditional. The effects show up in many ways, such as the fact that although fathers and other caregivers can play a huge role in a child’s upbringing, it still tends to be mothers who sow the seeds of a child’s vocabulary, says Bohannon.
As she argues, a human brain’s capacity to learn speech peaks around the age when, for many of us at least, we are frequently in our mother’s arms as she feeds or cuddles us, making women “language machines”.
What comes from language? Storytelling, for one thing – a specifically human trait that Bohannon lays at the feet of mothers. At times, her book flits between non-fiction and fiction, with Bohannon imagining an exhausted female hominin (maybe a prehistoric member of our species or a Neanderthal) trying to soothe her distressed baby with a yarn. None of this is too surprising, given Bohannon’s PhD covered the evolution of narrative and cognition
She goes on to wonder if what started as humble stories ended up giving birth to religions, fables and legends, which, in turn, shaped art, burial rituals, laws, marriages and social hierarchies globally. This, however, is quite a leap and one can’t help but think it oversimplifies the cultural forces that also moulded how we live.
Of course, language enables wisdom to be passed down too, which Bohannon links to menopause, a curious biological process. If organisms evolved to optimise the passing on of their genes, why would women lose this ability at 51 (the average age of menopause in high-income countries)? The menopause is rare, with only humans and whales known to go through it.
It is most commonly explained by the “grandmother hypothesis”: the idea that women reach an age when it is better for the continuation of humankind for them to look after the children they already have (and their children’s children) rather than to keep making new ones.
Unconvinced, Bohannon argues that the menopause arose alongside agriculture and the medicine, social stability and extra food that came with it, all of which helped us to live past our biologically attuned expiration date. “Maybe we didn’t evolve to have menopause. Maybe it was a natural side effect of our extending life spans,” she writes. Having older people around would have been useful because they could pass on wisdom learned in their younger years, such as how to survive severe droughts.
This is difficult to unravel and perhaps creates more questions than answers. Is Bohannon saying the menopause somehow helps women dodge the grave? Is it that women are inherently better communicators than men, so we want them to stick around and pass on their wisdom? Or is she arguing that pregnancy can be dangerous and there comes a time when it isn’t worth the risk given the value of a sage older woman? The arguments feel muaddled and surely Bohannon should have tried to invalidate the grandmother hypothesis too?
Putting her menopause argument to one side, the points raised in Eve usually make sense, though they often feel theoretical. Yet when trying to unpick evolution, with fossils only offering a certain amount of help, theorising may be our best shot.
As for whether sexism evolved, like many topics in the book, the jury is still out. It will be fascinating to see how the vote goes.
