Beyond Virility Signaling: How Moms Made Us
Bros who worship Jordan, Joe, Elon and Donald should read this book, which demolishes stale stereotypes about females and males.
HOBOKEN, OCTOBER 20, 2024. An ape-man brandishes a bone and beats a rival to death with it. The exultant killer hurls his weapon into the air, and the bone morphs into a satellite orbiting Earth. That’s the famous “Dawn of Man” scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which embodies all the tall tales starring males that male scientists have told about our origins.
In Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, Cat Bohannon says “Dawn of Man” conveys “Tool Triumphalism,” the notion that “man invented weapons, claimed dominion over his peers and the rest of the animal kingdom, and all our achievements flow from there.” Bohannon, who has a Ph.D. in the evolution of cognition and narrative from Columbia, urges us to set aside these stale male myths and consider how ancestral moms shaped us.
I can hear devotees of Jordan, Joe, Elon and Donald jeering, Woke feminist bullshit! But if they can stop virility-signaling for long enough to read a book, my fellow males should check out Bohannon’s funny, fascinating, rigorously researched bestseller. A few of my favorite takeaways:
Inventing Tools
Tech bros, the sort who cheered that Google engineer who said chicks aren’t cut out for tech, will surely roll their eyes at Bohannon’s suggestion that our female ancestors led the way in inventing tools.
But invention stems from desperation, and female hominids were far more desperate than males—smaller, weaker and hobbled by bearing and caring for offspring. Bohannon calls Eve a “terrified MacGyver” who made tools to compensate for her shortcomings.
Take Homo habilis, or “handy man,” a species that dates back roughly two million years. Axes, scrapers and other stone tools have been found with Habilis fossils in Tanzania. Bohannon thinks Habilis females used rocks to shape rocks for digging up and mashing tubers and butchering carcasses. (Habilis is thought to have been primarily a scavenging rather than hunting species.)
Female hominids might have invented weapons, too. Female chimpanzees are more likely than males to turn branches into spears for hunting bushbabies, a common source of meat. Chimp moms have been observed hunting with infants clinging to their backs.
Male chimps “sometimes use spears,” Bohannon says, “but their own bodies, bigger and stronger than the females, are often weapon enough.” If a male dies, it’s no big deal in terms of propagation of the species. If a mother dies, her offspring probably will too. Hence the extra pressure on females to survive. As a primatologist tells Bohannon, “Women do clever things because we have to.”
Inventing Gynecology
Bohannon credits our upright female ancestors with one truly necessary invention: not cooking or farming but gynecology, the science of bearing babies. Bipedalism, while it offered certain advantages, wreaked havoc with female reproductive systems, making them prone to deadly malfunctions.
“Most of the features that make our reproduction such a crapshoot were probably already in place by the time Habilis arrived,” Bohannon writes. “And they only got worse for her descendants.” The basic problem is that “human women have a really small pelvic opening and human babies have a really big head.” Bohannon likens giving birth to squeezing a watermelon through a lemon-sized hole.
So how did primordial moms help us survive and thrive? Bohannon’s answer is that females began helping each other bear kids and passing along trouble-shooting knowledge from generation to generation. In this way they founded gynecology, the first scientific field.
Inventing Language
In an extended comparison of Hillary and Bill Clinton, Bohannon grants that your average man, simply because he has bigger lungs, can address a political convention or other gathering more forcefully than your average woman.
Does that mean male windbags invented language? Doubtful. “For all of human prehistory,” Bohannon says, “going back to the origins of language itself, human beings have learned how to speak primarily by interacting with mothers.”
Hunter-gatherer moms typically breastfeed kids for three to five years. That is “precisely the stretch where [children’s] brains reach peak synaptic density and when most children’s vocabularies and grammatical sophistication explode.”
Modern mothers still spend far more time hanging out and hence talking with children than fathers. Moms in all cultures speak to offspring in the high-pitched, sing-song voice called “motherese.” Analogs of motherese have been observed in macaques, dolphins and songbirds. Something akin to motherese might have been the seed from which human language sprouted.
Inventing Stories
In an especially moving section of Eve, Bohannon muses over when in the course of evolution we became truly human. She wonders whether there was a primordial “dividing line: before it we were not human, but after it we were.”
That moment, she suggests, unfolded “late in the evening, in the low blue quiet before dreaming, when a single human being told the very first story.” And who told the first story? Was it a man bragging to his pals about how he speared a lion?
Bohannon doesn’t think so. She suspects the first story “took shape between two people who already spent most of their time trying to talk to each other: a fussy child who needed to sleep and a mother who needed to sleep even more.” The goal of the primal female storyteller, like that of modern moms, was to “amuse” and “soothe” her child.
Eve serves as a marvelous complement to Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies by anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, which I review here. Bohannon focuses on females, Hrdy on males, but both authors assemble masses of scientific data to challenge harmful, atavistic stereotypes about who we are.
Back for a moment to “Kubrick’s “Dawn of Man.” That scene lends implicit support to the insidious, widespread belief that war is innate and hence inevitable. Bohannon proposes replacing the macho myth of “tool triumphalism” with science-based “womb triumphalism,” depicted as follows:
One ape-woman helps another give birth and holds the newborn up toward the sky. That scene segues into a shot of a woman on a spaceship holding an infant in her arms. The camera zooms in on a pamphlet that the woman grips in one hand: “Planned Parenthood: The Best Care in Low Orbit.”
Further Reading:
Dear Feminists, Please Help End War!
Judith Butler on Nonviolence: A Critique
I Am One of Those Evil Woke Professors
Frans de Waal (RIP) and the Origins of War
Confessions of a Woke, Antiwar, Hockey-Playing Demonic Male
The End of War (just re-released in paperback)
Facebook comment from philosopher Tim Maudlin: It's hard to tell from the review how much is speculation. Since direct evidence of who did what would be pretty hard to come by, it seems as if it mostly must be.
But some of the argumentation you cite seems off. Consider this: "Male chimps “sometimes use spears,” Bohannon says, “but their own bodies, bigger and stronger than the females, are often weapon enough.” If a male dies, it’s no big deal in terms of propagation of the species. If a mother dies, her offspring probably will too. Hence the extra pressure on females to survive. As a primatologist tells Bohannon, “Women do clever things because we have to.”"
The proposition that males are much more expendable from an evolutionary perspective is certainly correct: lose a female and you lose not just possibly her presently existing offspring but all the offspring she would have had; lose a male and it should make about zero difference to the overall population: some other male will step in for the procreative part. Presumably, that's why males win overwhelmingly most of the Darwin Awards: a single successful male with respect to sexual competition can have many offspring while a female will likely have about the same number no matter what, so long as she survives. There could be a huge genetic payoff for a risk-taking male but not a female. But all of that argues, it seems to me, that the males would be engaged in the sort of situations that require weapons while the females would be preserved in safer situations, just from an evolutionary perspective. It's really not sufficient that a strong body be "often weapon enough": just one episode when it isn't and that's that.