Professor Alice Roberts on the Rutland Roman Villa dig while filming Digging For Britain (Image: BBC/Rare TV) Alice Roberts hands Humanists UK Presidency to Adam Rutherford". Humanists UK . Retrieved 8 June 2022. This is a detailed and richly imagined account of the deep history of the British landscape, which brings alive those “who have walked here before us”, and speaks powerfully of a sense of connectedness to place that is rooted in common humanity: “we are just the latest human beings to occupy this landscape”. Roberts, Alice (2014). The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being: Evolution and the Making of Us. Heron Books. ISBN 978-1-8486-6477-7. At one point Roberts memorably describes excavating Beaker pottery, like that found in the grave of the Amesbury Archer. It was, she writes movingly, “a gorgeous object”, one that allowed her to feel a profound connection across time to those involved in the burial: “Human experience is built of moments – and here were two, linked together across millennia. The moment I lifted the bowl out of the grave, my hands earthy from digging; the moment the potter (the mourner, the parent?) held the bowl in their hands, making that corded pattern, their hands covered in clay.”

From the revered to the reviled: there’s another account of bones found in Cheddar showing definite signs of cannibalism: bodies skinned and gnawed by fellow humans, ‘smashing open long bones to get at the marrow; right down to fingers, which also showed signs of having been chopped off and munched on’. (Though, as Alice cautions, be very careful about drawing conclusions. We don’t know if these corpses were eaten as vengeful victory over enemy tribes; a respectful way of honouring deceased friends and relatives; or even as a result of desperate hunger.) Alice grins. ‘We read it now and think: Pytheas could very well have got up to Shetland, with its white nights. Just extraordinary.’ It took but a small step to name this skeleton the Red Lady, or – as he romantically preferred – the Witch of Paviland. She might even, he delicately alludes, have been a prostitute, owing to the location of a Roman camp nearby. Alice first trained as a doctor before specialising in the crossover between human anatomy and archaeology and history. And she's published numerous books as well as presenting popular TV and radio shows about science. She's also a Professor of Public Engagement with Science at the University of Birmingham. And she has been vocal about her atheism. She's currently the president of Humanists UK. So her research combines biology and anatomy with archaeology and anthropology to shed new light on ancient history.

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]

It's really difficult to say, I mean, I suppose if you look at it from a broadly societal level, you'd say, well, they're not incompatible, because there's plenty of scientists that are religious, there are I mean, you know, if you look at scientists as a whole, we are less religious than the rest of the population. But from an individual perspective, there are obviously lots and lots of scientists doing absolutely brilliant work, very eminent scientists who are religious. So it's not incompatible on that kind of individual level for them. And you know, somehow, they are able to return to look at their religion in one way, or look at their science in one way. And the two are not in tension with each other in their minds. a b c "University of Bristol: Directory of Experts". University of Bristol . Retrieved 27 May 2009.Roberts, Alice (2015). The Celts: Search for a Civilisation. Heron Books. p.320. ISBN 978-1784293321. 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. Roberts is an author. [83] [84] [85] She has authored or co-authored a number of peer reviewed scientific articles in journals. [1] [86] [87] [88] [89] Her published books include: 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 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.

Proceedings of the 6th Annual Conference of the British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology. Archaeopress. 2007. ISBN 978-1-4073-0035-1. OCLC 124507736. Alice Roberts worked as a junior doctor with the National Health Service in South Wales for eighteen months after graduating. In 1998 she left clinical medicine and worked as an anatomy demonstrator at the University of Bristol, becoming a lecturer there in 1999.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”. 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. Isotopic analysis of the Amesbury Archer’s teeth reveals that he may have grown up near the Alps. Studies of DNA from other Beaker graves in Germany show ancestry from the Eurasian steppe and migration clearly played a major role in establishing Beaker culture. Indeed, in Britain genomes are dramatically different after 2500BC: “Neolithic ancestry is almost completely replaced, in the copper age, by genomes that share ancestry with central Europeans associated with the Beaker complex.” You know,’ Alice Roberts says, ‘we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of years of human history – all around the world… What we really see, when we start looking properly, is the incredible diversity of those cultures, through time and through space.’

RT 3393 – 10–16 Dec 1988 (South) BLUE PETER – 30 Years – Alice Roberts with her Blue Peter picture". Radio Times (3393). 10 December 1988. Archived from the original on 27 September 2013 – via Kelly Books and Magazines. From 2009 to 2016 Roberts was Director of Anatomy at the NHS Severn Deanery School of Surgery [11] and also an honorary fellow at Hull York Medical School. [19] [20] Dr Alice Roberts: Anatomist, author, broadcaster and distinguished supporter of Humanism". British Humanist Association . Retrieved 28 November 2013.The 'Red Lady of Paviland' skeleton, laid out in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (Image: Ethan Doyle White/Wikimedia/Creative Commons) 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? 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?. Whereas actually, I think what we're saying here is, it's far from anonymous, at least in those tombs, where we've got this evidence of relatives buried in the same place. And perhaps what we are seeing is, is kind of family plots, you know, which we're obviously familiar with, later on, and up until quite recently. And it may be that these are essentially family tombs for the elite. Because we are entering a period of time where we're seeing a more kind of hierarchical structure of society. And they're making their mark in the landscape. It’s a fascinating time, because this Neolithic period is the first time we get people really stamping their identity on the landscape. And, you know, creating big monumental architecture in the landscape, from stones circles, to these amazing chamber tombs.