Ancestors: A prehistory of Britain in seven burials

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Ancestors is a carefully thought out and well-expressed argument for a new way of doing prehistory -- trying to prevent the shape of present-day society from dictating how we understand the past.

e 1-star, the author's atheist/ anti-church droning and never missing an opportunity to inject wokeness. 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. Can you imagine an existence of years of puss seeping abscessed teeth slowly rotting through your mandible? It explores forgotten journeys and memories of migrations long ago, written into genes and preserved in the ground for thousands of years.In her book, Roberts takes seven different prehistoric burials and explores who they may have been and what they reveal about their communities. The native life, is far from the idyllic, pastoral picture archaeology and modern documentaries tend to paint. The real picture is that perhaps up to 1 out 4 in the Central Europe population reflect war-like bone trauma over the 1000-year era, and it's unseen in earlier and later populations.

The grave goods and the broken remains of five distinctive pottery beakers with a characteristic upside-down bell shape revealed it to be a Beaker burial. Roberts is the new Da Vinci, able to shift between science and humanities, the objective and subjective, the global and the individual. 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.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.