prof alice roberts - bath.qxp_Layout 1 25/06/2021 17:24 Page 1
BOOKS | ARCHAEOLOGY
No bone unturned
As technology takes a major leap forward, archaeology and genetics have been set on a collision course. Bearing messages from the ancient world – some buried in mistruths for millennia – scientist and writer Professor Alice Roberts reaches right back in time with her new book Ancestors, as she tells Millie Bruce-Watt is clear and captivating. We caught up with the Bristol-born bone expert to find out more about how the book came to be; how advances in genetics are transforming archaeology; and, of course, how cannibalistic cavemen once roamed our local landscape.
Professor Alice Roberts. Credit: Paul Wilkinson photography
The power of technology “Ancestors focuses on a series of ancient burials that help to tell the story of prehistoric Britain, and it draws on my fascination with this collision between archaeology and genetics, which has been happening for a while but feels like it’s coming into its own now,” says Roberts. Since making The Incredible Human Journey 13 years ago, technology has come on in leaps and bounds. From analysing DNA and discovering small clues in a skeleton, scientists are now able to sequence whole genomes in a single day. As a result, they have been able to see more depth and complexity than ever before in the story of human origins and understand the evolution of human health and disease. Roberts is also helping researchers with a project at the Francis Crick Institute in London entitled 1000 Ancient Genomes. It is the most ambitious ancient genomics project to date and the DNA it looks at will be fully sequenced, “leaving no stone unturned, no stretch of DNA unread,” as Roberts writes. “I’ve enjoyed writing about burial sites and discoveries that happened a long time ago, but I’ve also enjoyed having that element of a project that’s live and happening right now. One of the most interesting questions in Ancestors is all about British prehistory. For example, in the Bronze Age, we see a completely new culture arriving but we didn’t know whether it was just people already here, adopting this culture, or whether it was a new group of people coming in. We couldn’t get to the bottom of that question until genetics could shed some light on it. Now, looking at genomes in the preceding Neolithic, we can see that there is a huge population turnover – it was new people arriving and eventually their genes are the ones which predominated the population. It’s really interesting to see how that culture changed over the years and we can imagine more families arriving, over a few centuries.”
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nthropologist, biologist, broadcaster, author and Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham, Alice Roberts has been working where biology meets archaeology for the last 20 years, bearing messages from the ancient world and pushing our understanding of human evolution ever further. A familiar face to many, Roberts has appeared regularly on the BBC and Channel 4, presenting the geographical and environmental series Coast, Digging for Britain and Time Team as well as a number of documentaries focusing on ancient migrations, evolution and prehistory. A prolific scientist and writer, Roberts is now back in the limelight with her latest book, Ancestors: A Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials. Less than two weeks after it hit the shelves, Ancestors became a bestseller in The Sunday Times. Most interestingly to us Bathonians, the book explores an ancient burial site in Cheddar Gorge, which unlocks astonishing stories of ancient Britain that had been buried in mistruths for millennia. Described as “the new Da Vinci” in a recent review of Ancestors, Roberts is a formidable storyteller and her fascination with her subject 16 TheBATHMagazine
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july 2021
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issue 221
The making of Ancestors Ancestors is split into seven chapters, with each chapter focusing on a different discovery. From an elaborate burial in the depths of the Ice Age to the most richly furnished grave that’s ever been discovered in Europe, Roberts has delved into the history of ideas and brought individuals’ stories back to life. “All of them are fascinating because they are all quite different. Some of them have these interesting back stories and then some of them are far more recent like the Amesbury Archer turning up when a developer was having to excavate ahead of a new build.” The Amesbury Archer is an early Bronze Age man whose grave was discovered during excavations in Amesbury, near Stonehenge. The grave was uncovered in May 2002, and the man is believed to date from about 2,300 BC. “This man was buried with 18 arrow heads; he had three copper knives; he had gold ornaments. We’ve got genetic information about him as well as chemical analysis of his teeth. so we know that he grew up somewhere around the Alps and his burial tells us that he must have been seen as special. The interesting thing about his skeleton is that he’s got abnormalities in his shoulders, which may possibly be connected to the fact that he was an archer. But perhaps more
