BOOK REVIEW: Eve (How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution)

By Cat Bohannon. Alfred E. Knopf, New York. Hard cover, with bibliography and index, 613pp U$35

The human race’s first identifiable ancestor, it seems, was not a monkey, as the doubters of Charles Darwin jeered, but something that more closely resembled a rodent identified as Morganucodon, which laid eggs but also had glands that began secreting milk for its young. Some 200 million-odd years ago in the Jurassic period, it may have been the first a…