Bohannon describes pregnancy as “a dance between what the mother’s body needs and what her hungry offspring need, with each accommodation skirting just on the edge of killing one or both of them”.
At each stage, Bohannon makes clear just how unlikely human survival has been, with our narrow pelvises, huge heads, needy babies and hungry brains. And so, she argues, the innovations that have allowed our species to survive and flourish were not the spear, the wheel or the internet, but midwifery and gynaecology, wet nursing and prenatal care. Without our super-social cooperation, we’d have disappeared back in prehistoric Africa, leaving barely a fossil.
The book sets out to turn our male-centric understanding of the human body, and history, on its head. Bohannon creates female characters out of our earliest common ancestors, and rewrites the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, to argue that perhaps it was women who led the development of language, tools and walking on two legs.
Moving between evolutionary biology, physiology, paleoanthropology and genetics, from the Jurassic period to the most cutting-edge scientific research, this page-turning history of the human mammal describes seven main characters: our ancestral “Eves”, as Bohannon calls them. In the beginning, there was “Morgie” (Morganucodon), an egg-laying cross between a weasel and a mouse that was probably the first creature to lactate. More than 200m years later, Morgie’s breastfeeding descendants are so sophisticated that a mother’s body can change the composition of its milk in response to hormonal messages in the baby’s saliva.
Sorry for quoting the Guardian! https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/30/how-women-drove-evolution-cat-bohannon-on-her-radical-new-history-of-humanity
How did this book get past the trans censors? A book idnetifying how female biology is unique to .... women, ie biological females.