Bookshop Santa Cruz presents author Cat Bohannon who will be in-conversation with Vicky Oelze about Bohannon’s book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution—a myth-busting, eye-opening landmark account of how humans evolved, offering a paradigm shift in our thinking about what the female body is, how it came to be, and how this evolution still shapes all our lives today. Now in paperback, Eve is also available in an edition adapted for young adults.

“A smart, funny, scientific deep-dive into the power of a woman’s body, Eve surprises, educates, and emboldens.” — Bonnie Garmus, bestselling author of Lessons in Chemistry

How did the female body drive 200 million years of human evolution? • Why do women live longer than men? • Why are women more likely to get Alzheimer’s? • Why do girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet? • Is sexism useful for evolution? • And why, seriously why, do women have to sweat through our sheets every night when we hit menopause?

These questions are producing some truly exciting science – and in Eve, with boundless curiosity and sharp wit, Cat Bohannon covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex: “We need a kind of user’s manual for the female mammal.

Cat Bohannon is a researcher and author with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Georgia Review, The Story Collider, and Poets Against the War. She lives with her family in Seattle.

Vicky Oelze is an associate professor in anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, where she teaches subjects including human evolution, archeological science and primatology. Dr. Oelze joined UCSC after completing her PhD in Archeological Science at Leiden University in the Netherlands and almost a decade of research at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. Her archeological work spans five continents and ranges from the first farmers in prehistoric Europe to the history of the transatlantic slave trade. Her primatological research focuses on the dietary ecology of African great apes and how maternal investment in terms of breastfeeding varies between species and populations.

More information at: Cat Bohannon, Eve | Bookshop Santa Cruz

Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.