My guest today, Cat Bohannon describes herself as a researcher, scholar, author, and

freak.

She's written a book called Eve, how the female body drove 200 million years of human evolution.

We are by no means the perfect model of a success story. If you dropped a Martian down, they wouldn't be like,

that's the guy. We were by no means the top of the food chain,

and we were not necessarily even the most clever, but either. Apes are really clever. We're just another ape.

Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.

I did not expect to like this book.

I'm generally just not that interested in things that happen

200 million years ago or even 10,000 years ago. I tend to be much more excited by modern

events. But in chapter after chapter, Kep O'Hannon offers such a fresh and surprising

perspective that I couldn't put the book down and over I found myself bringing up these stories and conversation

Are her hypotheses right? I have no idea you'll have to form your own opinions on that, but one thing I'm pretty

confident about, you will not listen to Captain Hannon and say she's boring.

I have to confess I wasn't familiar with your work. The first description I found about you

mentioned your PhD in evolution of narrative and condition and of course I didn't know what that meant.

And then it mentioned that you'd published

a wide range of essays and poems.

And I've got nothing against poets.

I just have no idea what I'd talked to poet about and it said you'd written a book

about the female body. That was the sum of everything I knew when I opened your book

that it was a book by a poet about the female body.

...