This Seattle author tells the 'deeper truth of our species' and evolution through the female body

Cat Bohannon's "Eve" is vaguely intimidating. Fine, more than a little intimidating.

It's more than 600 pages, promising to cover 200 million years of human evolution. The young adult adaptation, just released this week, is 200 pages shorter but no less full to bursting with stuff.

Stuff about the human uterus. Stuff about legs (a whole chapter on legs, actually). Stuff about voices and brains and even the "Alien" prequel, "Prometheus."

And some really hopeful stuff, for people — young adults or otherwise — who may find it hard to be hopeful today. Consider this passage (condensed slightly):

"I started writing this book when Obama was president," Bohannon said during an interview at Third Place Books. "So, when it came time for revisions, I had to sit with my feelings for a bit, you know, in a changed world. And I decided that, yes, I am still hopeful, because being hopeful is not being a Pollyanna. Being hopeful itself is an act of resistance. It is saying that you can't actually take away our vision of the future in which we all get to coexist without overt harm."

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Bohannon was at Third Place Books on Feb. 26, in part to celebrate the release of the young adult adaptation of her book, "Eve: How the Female Body Shaped Human Evolution," and to celebrate her original work, "Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution." The latter won a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association award, which Bohannon was presented with on Wednesday.

Bohannon, an author and researcher with a PhD from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition, said she worked for 10 years, writing and researching "Eve." That's a good chunk of time, but a fraction of the "deep time" she wrote about; deep time refers to geologic or cosmic time, meaning millions, even billions of years.

"That is deeper time than your grandma, right?" Bohannon said. "And when you spend a lot of time thinking about deep time, and you have a kind of camera-zooming-out, dizzying perspective of things — which is the work of thinking of deep time — that means that you can see trends. And in the history of hominids, the last few million years, those creatures that became Homo sapiens... the trend has actually been an embodied move towards egalitarian society across the sexes."

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The evidence is in our skeletons, she said. The features of sexual dimorphism — features that distinguish male from female — have faded over millions of years.

"The deep history of what became humanity is actually the story of the sexes, effectively, becoming more equal in strength, becoming more equal in... mating patterns, and distributions of power," Bohannon explained. "That's a deeper truth of our species.

"If you look at the last 400 years, if you look at the last 100 years, it seems clear that in many, many human societies, we have very much been moving forward towards support gender egalitarian society across many different cultures. Yes, there's pushback. Yes, there are eddies in that freaking river. Yes, you can't expect it to be anything but a bumpy ride with a lot of weird turns. But it's what our it's what our evolutionary chain has been doing for a long time."

Whether readers pick up a copy of the original "Eve" or the new YA adaptation, they'll be presented with an incredibly well-researched yet conversational and funny account of humanity, an account that is, in and of itself, human.

Meeting Bohannon made it clear how she wrote a scientific tome with so much heart. She described herself to me as "weird," but I'd say it's more that she's a woman with things to say. And as far as humanity has come in the last 200 million years, somehow, we don't always know how to classify the Cat Bohannon's among us.

Worry less about classification — except maybe with regard to evolution — and more about taking some time to learn a whole lot of stuff about the human body with "Eve."