Ancestors: A prehistory of Britain in seven burials

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And with me now is Niki Smith, deputy editor of New Humanist magazine. So Niki, what's your take on what we've just heard from Alice? And then when we're looking for solutions in a similar way, to do that as objectively as possible and to strip away ideology. And I feel in the UK that we've particularly been very ideology-driven. This “following the science thing is not true at all, we've been following an ideology, and trying to shoehorn the science into that. There's always kind of worries about what's going to happen to science in a time of crisis, that we're depending on it so much. And that if there is, if there's any kind of nuance, or uncertainty around various facts and figures, then, you know, the public might feel uneasy about that, or anxious about that. And I think that's, I don't think that's the reason to pretend that the evidence is either more robust or more certain than we know it to be. I think the absolute fundamental point is that we need to maintain trust, and that we need to, we need scientists who are engaging with the public in a very level way.

In March 2011, she presented a BBC documentary in the Horizon series entitled Are We Still Evolving? She presented the series Origins of Us, which aired on BBC Two in October 2011, examining how the human body has adapted through seven million years of evolution. The last part of this series featured Roberts visiting the Rift Valley in East Africa. But there's some really profound bigger picture stuff as well. It's quite a disruptive technology at the moment, because it's coming along and providing answers that we didn't even know were possible 10 years ago. But I think it will get to the point where it becomes an almost standard thing to do when you're analysing human remains, in the same way that we use radiocarbon dating to work out the date of any organic remains. I think that we'll be seeing genomes used much more frequently and much more widely.Not a regular interest of mine, but I’ve seen the author present some good BBC TV documentaries which she does very well, and the book was staring at me expectantly in a local bookshop, so I bought it on a curious whim. For me, it's just a very intensely personal thing. And for me, there was tension. And I was reading a lot. And you know, when I was a teenager, I was reading a lot of books about evolution, but also about these kind of philosophies to say Stephen Jay Gould, in particular, he came up with the idea of “non-overlapping magisteria”, where he said, actually, religion and science don't need to be in tension, because they they're doing different jobs, they're explaining different things. And there might be, you know, sometimes you will turn to religion for answers. And sometimes you're turning for science to answers. And they don't need to be in tension with each other. But in my own mind, they were. So it's interesting, isn't it? Because it's like, for me, it doesn't work. But obviously, it does work for some other people. This is a terrific, timely and transporting book - taking us heart, body and mind beyond history, to the fascinating truth of the prehistoric past and the present’ Bettany Hughes And also, the other thing for me is that I feel very much that it's rather like that idea that you should travel and you should experience other cultures, because that makes you look at yourself in an objective way. And it makes you look at your own culture in an objective way. And it also makes you realise that you have this commonality with humans the world over, you know, that we're all very, very similar. 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”. In her book, Roberts takes seven different prehistoric burials and explores who they may have been and what they reveal about their communities. It requires imagination, as well as scientific expertise, to read the “stories written in stone, pottery, metal and bone”.

Stonehenge: The Lost Circle Revealed". BBC Two. 12 February 2021. Archived from the original on 12 February 2021 . Retrieved 19 February 2021. In April 2012, Alice Roberts presented Woolly Mammoth: Secrets from the Ice on BBC Two. From 22 to 24 October 2012, she appeared, with co-presenter Dr George McGavin, in the BBC series Prehistoric Autopsy, which discussed the remains of early hominins such as Neanderthals, Homo erectus and Australopithecus afarensis. In May and June 2013 she presented the BBC Two series Ice Age Giants. In September 2014, she was a presenter on the Horizon programme Is Your Brain Male or Female?. Robson-Brown, Kate; Roberts, Alice (2007). BABAO 2004: Proceedings of the 6th Annual Conference of the British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology, University of Bristol. British Archaeological Reports. Oxford, England: Archaeopress. ISBN 978-1-4073-0035-1. But it's, you know, it's very, it's very difficult. I mean, there have been times in the pandemic, where we've got this great massive group of scientists advising the government, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, SAGE, and, you know, there'll be some times when I don't necessarily agree with the analysis, the kind of the solutions that perhaps they're suggesting, but I respect them immensely. But the awful thing that's happened is that they have become, I suppose the fall guys, you know. If there's an unpopular government policy, which draws on the science and the science as it's presented to the government by SAGE, then SAGE members become targeted for abuse online. Professor Alice Roberts on the Rutland Roman Villa dig while filming Digging For Britain (Image: BBC/Rare TV)

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Writing in the i newspaper in 2016, Roberts dismissed the aquatic ape hypothesis (AAH) as a distraction "from the emerging story of human evolution that is more interesting and complex", adding that AAH has become "a theory of everything" that is simultaneously "too extravagant and too simple". She concluded by saying that "science is about evidence, not wishful thinking". [25] [26] Roberts was awarded British Humanist of the Year 2015, for work promoting the teaching of evolution in schools. [70] Yeah, absolutely. I think there's something really fascinating about these sort of legends that we grow up with, and the points of crossover between legend and history, and maybe not all is, as we think it is. Overall, I enjoyed this book for the details of new excavations and the Salisbury Museum segments. I wouldn’t recommend it for your first British archaeology book (I read Britain Begins by Barry Cunliffe about five years ago and would recommend that), but it is good general book to read if you want to explore further.

Those Neolithic burials are about making a statement in the landscape. They’re about territory; about saying: This is ours; this has always been ours. This is where our family has been for many generations, and this is our family tomb.a b Roberts, Alice (2007). Don't Die Young: An Anatomist's Guide to Your Organs and Your Health. Bloomsbury Publishing: London, 2007. ISBN 978-0-7475-9025-5. Roberts lives with her husband, David Stevens, and two children, a daughter born in 2010 and a son born in 2013. [74] She met her husband in Cardiff in 1995 when she was a medical student and he was an archaeology student. [75] [5] They married in 2009. [76] a b "Professor Alice Roberts – Professor of Public Engagement in Science". University of Birmingham . Retrieved 19 January 2019. In the first episode, Dr Alice Roberts looks at how our skeleton reveals our incredible evolutionary journey.

Perhaps one of the problems – certainly when it comes to British prehistory - is the paucity of written accounts before the arrival of highly literate Romans on our isle. Alice Roberts was appointed the University of Birmingham’s first professor of public engagement in science in February 2012. Roberts has been a member of the advisory board of Cheltenham Science Festival for ten years and a member of the Advisory Board of the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath since 2018. a b Roberts, Alice; McLysaght, Aoife (2018). "Who am I?". The Royal Institution. Archived from the original on 10 January 2021 . Retrieved 19 February 2021.

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Roberts studied medicine at the University of Wales College of Medicine (now part of Cardiff University) and graduated in 1997 with a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MB BCh) degree, having gained an intercalated Bachelor of Science degree in Anatomy. [7] [10] [11] Research and career [ edit ] Roberts giving a public lecture for the opening of the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath in 2018