Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon
There are many stories we tell ourselves about our bodies. These stories are often based in a sort of instinctual logic that only renders them true some of the time. For example, women with wider hips and higher quantities of glute and thigh fat do have an easier time producing healthy, smart babies. Yet breast size, which we may imagine as correlating with milk production to explain our culture’s general affinity for bigger cups, plays little role in infant development at all.
Stories like these, as contemporary as they may be, are thousands—millions!—of years in the making. They pre-date medicine and the categorization of bodies according to scientific labels. They pre-date language. They even pre-date humans.
