Ancestors: A prehistory of Britain in seven burials

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Roberts and Aoife McLysaght co-presented the 2018 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in London. [24] [27] She was president of the British Science Association for the year 2019–2020. [28] And I think the first thing that we feel when we read about this, or even see the remains, as I've done, is a sense of quite intense disgust, actually. Which I think is reasonable, because we don't tend to go around eating each other nowadays. But again, we need to be objective: we need to think, right? Was it abhorrent to them? It obviously wasn't that abhorrent, because they're doing it. And you've got to think about all the reasons why somebody might have been eating someone else, you know. It could be nutritional, it could be that they're starving. I think the skull cups goes against that a bit. And there's also a bit of engraving on a radius too, so there's something more going on than just food. 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.

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.So there's a possibility that that has then, you know, passed into legend, as it were, and then gone through time. But I think that the Neolithic tombs are more broadly interesting in that way, it has a lot to do with collective memory. And it's a lot to do with, you know, we're seeing quite a lot of these tombs containing relatives, for instance, not necessarily in one person – as in this man who was a product of incest – but we're seeing …. Primrose Grange was a father and a daughter, there was a father and a son buried in two separate but fairly close tombs in Ireland as well. And then an instance of brothers buried in a tomb in Trumpington Meadows in Cambridgeshire. So this is fascinating, because we just haven't been able to get that information before genetics came along. We've wondered about what these Neolithic chambered tombs are, we've known for a long time that they’re communal burials, that there's a lot of human remains in some of them, and then wondered about what that means. The human remains are quite often fairly mixed up. So there's been one hypothesis that perhaps, once you die, you kind of enter this realm of the dead as a sort of communal entity, you'd lose your own individual identity, which would be subsumed into that communal identity, and it's somehow anonymizing. In 2011, Roberts was elected an honorary fellow of the British Science Association, [22] and a fellow of the Royal Society of Biology. [63] In 2014, she was selected by the Science Council as one of their leading UK practising scientists. [64] During 2014, she was President of The Association for Science Education, [64] and presented the Morgan-Botti lecture. [65]

But that doesn't mean that we have to invent things to fill in these gaps. And we have this brilliant tool called science, which can help us to explore these gaps, but also actually to accept that science probably won't be able to tell us everything, and that we still don't need to invoke supernatural entities. And yeah, so I think for me, it was quite a long time after I became an atheist, that I realised that actually what described my approach to the world best was humanism, because of the way that we view the world as a natural place and our position in it is a natural phenomenon, that we are an evolved species just like any other. So that came through very strongly from me studying biology. 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 simultaneous “too extravagant and too simple”. She concluded by saying that “science is about evidence, not wishful thinking”. In 2009 she co-presented modules for the Beating Bipolar programme, the first internet-based education treatment for patients with bipolar depression, trialled by Cardiff University researchers. However, from August 2009 until January 2012, Roberts was a visiting fellow in both the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Department of Anatomy of the University of Bristol. From 2009 to 2016 Roberts was Director of Anatomy at the NHS Severn Deanery School of Surgery and also an honorary fellow at Hull York Medical School. The 'Red Lady of Paviland' skeleton, laid out in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (Image: Ethan Doyle White/Wikimedia/Creative Commons)

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] 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. Royal Society David Attenborough Award and Lecture | Royal Society". royalsociety.org . Retrieved 1 September 2020.

Alice Roberts and Andrew Copson, ‘The Little Book of Humanism: Universal Lessons on Finding Purpose, Meaning and Joy’ (2020) Yeah, well, I was brought up in a quite devoutly religious family. So I got taken to church, pretty much every Sunday, and to Sunday school. And brought up with no kind of idea that there was really anything else on offer. And I went as far as getting confirmed. So I think I got confirmed when I was about 14. In October 2014, she presented Spider House. [48] In 2015, she co-presented a 3-part BBC TV documentary with Neil Oliver entitled The Celts: Blood, Iron and Sacrifice [49] and wrote a book to tie in with the series: The Celts: Search for a Civilisation. [50] In April–May 2016, she co-presented the BBC Two programme Food Detectives which looked at food nutrition and its effects on the body. In August 2016, she presented the BBC Four documentary Britain's Pompeii: A Village Lost in Time, which explored the Must Farm Bronze Age settlement in Cambridgeshire. [51] In May 2017, she was a presenter of the BBC Two documentary The Day The Dinosaurs Died. [52] In April 2018, she presented the six-part Channel 4 series Britain's Most Historic Towns, [53] which examines the history of British towns, which was followed by a second series in May 2019 and a third series in November 2020.Higgins, Charlotte (16 February 2021). "Another part of the Stonehenge mystery has been unearthed before our eyes". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 18 February 2021 . Retrieved 19 February 2021. What is the Stonehenge that Parker Pearson brings us? It is a Stonehenge of a people who were competent and able. A Stonehenge of migrants, of people who travelled great distances, who gathered together in large numbers to erect remarkable structures, who cooperated. This is a speculative picture and tentative, as Parker Pearson would surely be the first to admit. Pearson, Mike Parker; Pollard, Josh; Richards, Colin; Welham, Kate; Kinnaird, Timothy; Shaw, Dave; Simmons, Ellen; Stanford, Adam; Bevins, Richard; Ixer, Rob; Ruggles, Clive; Rylatt, Jim; Edinborough, Kevan (February 2021). "The original Stonehenge? A dismantled stone circle in the Preseli Hills of west Wales". Antiquity. 95 (379): 85–103. doi: 10.15184/aqy.2020.239. a b Sherwood, Harriet (11 November 2018). "TV scientist Alice Roberts to be president of Humanists UK". The Guardian . Retrieved 12 November 2018. Indeed, Alice Roberts was up at Uley Camp just the other weekend. ‘What a fantastic hillfort – the views are absolutely stunning! But you've asked another question, which is about how scientists get information across to people and whether that's been done particularly well over the course of the pandemic. And I think it's very difficult because what we've seen over the last 18 months is that it's become incredibly political. And it's actually very difficult to tease apart the politics from the science and of course, every individual scientist – scientists aren’t apolitical, but I think the important thing is that they know that that they know, in their professional life, they strive for objectivity. And I think that's, you know, what we really need in a time of pandemic is those scientists that, you know, bring that objectivity of their professional discipline to bear on the evidence that we can see in front of us.

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.The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being: Evolution and the Making of Us. Heron Books. 2014. ISBN 978-1-8486-6477-7. OCLC 910702281.