Every year we publish a selection of books and pamphlets that address the key issues facing activists and trade unionists. Life was a state of existence with a disease, bad teeth, crippling, broken bones healed and unhealed (the Hunter of Amesbury had lost his knee cap and recovered with a horribly crippled leg), heavy burden bone scars. This is a book about belonging: about walking in ancient places, in the footsteps of the ancestors . Had she been able to infuse the whole of the text with this compelling style, I would have given the book five stars. She is certainly not recommending that we try to fit those remains into 21st century gender categories, but uses that as an example to show how 19th and 20th century ideas of gender and class have affected archaeological theories from those times.

Ancestors well worth reading with a sophisticated intelligent engagement with the past, and how perceptions and ideas change through time and not to just look through the cultural lens of the present. The author delivers several of the best summaries I've seen regarding the Beaker People, Arras culture, genetics and isotope analysis, and the long-term implications of 100,000-some years of migrations and retreats. Together with two stone wrist guards, or bracers, they formed the largest collection of bronze age archery equipment ever found. The Amesbury Archer is preserved in Salisbury Museum and, according to Roberts, “our visits to museums, to gaze on such human remains, are a form of ancestor worship”.There is such a scope of knowledge between the covers of this book that you feel like a better and more knowledgeable person having read it. Which seems to have brought Alice Roberts under attack in the reviews on here and more widely from archeologists that just had their pet theories implode and of course the religious, many of whom might use science and technology but hate it when it makes them wrong. But in Ancestors , pre-eminent archaeologist, broadcaster and academic Professor Alice Roberts explores what we can learn about the very earliest Britons, from burial sites and by using new technology to analyse ancient DNA. This is a good thing, because it means she has to paint word pictures of the burials, and her writing is beautiful. The blending of hunter gatherers with farmers was troubling, at least in some regions where evidence exists.

Studies of DNA from other Beaker graves in Germany show ancestry from the Eurasian steppe and migration clearly played a major role in establishing Beaker culture.Alice Roberts argues in Ancestors that we need to consciously set aside our own bias and try to evaluate archaeological remains on their own terms. The scale and the detail of the Thousand Ancient Genomes project, which is collaborating with archaeologists across the UK, could transform our understanding of prehistoric Britain, especially as regards mobility and migrations. As the Scythians also originating from the Pontic Steppe and known as a later but connected culture to the Yamnaya is well documented with having female warriors by Ancient Greek historians and through archaeology burials and ancient DNA. They ended up recreating prehistoric societies which mirrored their own, largely down to circular arguments. This is a subject about which she has been involved as broadcaster and author for many years and about which she is both authoritive and a great communicator.