Ancestors: A prehistory of Britain in seven burials

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Absolutely. And some of that, I guess, is about how it's communicated. And how these, you know, quite complicated scientific developments are put across to the public, which I guess is something that you think about, both in your books and your broadcasting. And I know you're, you're a Professor of Public Engagement with Science as well. One thing I wondered about, I think we hear a lot about the failings of the media, in reporting on science, you know, that this idea of crushing nuance or not fully understanding the peer review process, and so on. But I wondered what scientists can get wrong in communicating with the media. So what’s the kind of flipside of that? Copson, Andrew; Roberts, Alice (2020). The Little Book of Humanism: Universal lessons on finding purpose, meaning and joy. Little, Brown Book Group. ISBN 978-0349425467.

The word "archaeology" can mean two things -- it can refer to the things that archaeologists are interested in or the things that archaeologists do. Typically when someone says, "I'm interested in archaeology" you would assume they meant the former: that they are interested in early humans, particularly as reflected in their material remains. But if that person was a sociologist speaking in her professional capacity, you might instead think she means the second thing: the activities and interactions of archaeologists. I will refer to the first subject by the shorthand "human prehistory" and the second "archaeologistology". Burials are like time capsules - each one, a physical biography, written into the skeleton. Objects placed into graves provide us with some of our clearest evidence of ancient cultures - and the science of genomics is now revolutionising our perception of the deep past. From the colonisation of the globe in the Palaeolithic to the prehistory of Britain, Alice reflects on what archaeological discoveries tell us about our ancestors and the human experience that binds us all together. 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. 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

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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. 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. 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.

Let’s return to that Red Lady skeleton. Just by looking at the carefully preserved bones (which she lays out in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History), Alice can see from the left pelvic bone that – far from being a witch – this was an adult male. Mind-bogglingly, radio-carbon dating carried out in 2006 indicated he lived 34,000 years ago, well before the peak of the last Ice Age. In other words, his is the earliest burial found anywhere in Britain. She is a pescatarian, [77] "a confirmed atheist" [78] and former president of Humanists UK, beginning her three-and-a-half-year term in January 2019. [79] [28] She is now a vice president of the organisation. [80] Her children were assigned a faith school due to over-subscription of her local community schools; she campaigns against state-funded religious schools, citing her story as an example of the problems perpetuated by faith schools. [81] 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.Cardiff researchers to test first online treatment for bipolar depression". Wales Online. 12 April 2009 . Retrieved 15 August 2018. Roberts was awarded British Humanist of the Year 2015, for work promoting the teaching of evolution in schools. [70]

So we're not just getting the biology of the individual on their own from their bones, we're actually seeing a lot more about that individual and who they were in their community, and what their culture was about. And then burial itself, I think, is interesting, because we don't really see any other animals doing it. We know that other animals mourn. We know that chimpanzees mourn. Chimpanzee mothers who will carry the dead infant with them for days. Elephants will return to the corpse of a friend or relative, again and again. So there's definitely evidence of something that looks like mourning and an understanding of the loss of an individual. I don't think other animals, even chimpanzees, understand that they're going to die. So I think that's something that does mark us that is different, that we know that at some point, we're going to die. I think all of religion is about that, it’s about the kind of the terror of knowing that we're mortal. And trying to deal with that. And obviously, humanists have a different way of dealing with that. Gallagher, Paul (30 August 2014). "Alice Roberts: She's done pretty well, for a boffin without a beard". The Independent on Sunday. Archived from the original on 31 August 2014 . Retrieved 16 October 2017. And I think there was something else. I did believe very strongly in the capability of humans to make the world a better place, and to cooperate with each other, and to use these kind of best aspects of what makes us human. So capabilities like empathy, kindness, together with logic and rationality, and that these things together were kind of the best you could be as a human and would help you make decisions about your own life, but also about society more generally, as well. And then you get well actually, that is humanism. On the surface, this is a book about a few selected burials in the area that is now the UK. The burials are described in detail, as is the history of their discovery, excavation and the theories around them. There are very few pictures in the book -- really just a few paintings by Alice Roberts herself. This is a good thing, because it means she has to paint word pictures of the burials, and her writing is beautiful.Roberts was born in Bristol in 1973, [5] the daughter of an aeronautical engineer and an English and arts teacher. [6] She grew up in the Bristol suburb of Westbury-on-Trym where she attended The Red Maids' School. [5] [7] [8] In December 1988, she won the BBC1 Blue Peter Young Artists competition, appearing with her picture and the presenters on the front cover of the 10 December 1988 edition of the Radio Times. [9] It's really difficult, isn't it? Because I think I mean, I've included that in there. And I do wonder if there's some kind of remembrance of that as a hill of sin? Because recent genetic evidence has shown that a man buried in Newgrange is the incestuous son of either a parent and a child, or two siblings. So you’ll never know if it's a parent and child or two siblings, we just know it was two first degree relatives.

Well David Reich is a real pioneer in ancient genetics. And he's really helped to bring genetics to the fore when it comes to exploring some of these questions, particularly about ancient migrations. I would urge anybody who is interested in this whole sphere of archaeology meets genetics to read David Reich’s brilliant book.On 12 February 2021, Roberts presented a one-hour BBC Two documentary, Stonehenge: The Lost Circle Revealed, [56] about Mike Parker Pearson's five-year-long quest that filled in a 400-year historical gap in the provenance of the bluestones of Stonehenge and Waun Mawn. [57] [58] [59] In the first episode, Dr Alice Roberts looks at how our skeleton reveals our incredible evolutionary journey. With Reason is where we meet people in fields like philosophy, science and culture whose work and ideas challenge dogma and lazy thinking. That's the place to consider questions of reason and unreason. belief and disbelief, critical thought and debate and today it's a place to think big about who we are and where we've come from.