Professor Alice Roberts’s latest book, Ancestors, is an exploration of prehistoric Britain viewed through seven burials. It’s also about the science bringing their stories back to life, she tells Katie Jarvis
The Reverend William Buckland was (if portraits are anything to go by) a man of sartorial – if eccentric – elegance. (That eccentricity encompassed his dining table, too: guests might have considered an invitation a double-edged sword in the light of his propensity to serve crocodile, bluebottle and mouse, among other ‘exotic’ dishes.)
He was also – as Professor Alice Roberts details in her latest book, Ancestors: A prehistory of Britain in seven burials – a pioneer of geology and archaeology. Indeed, this dedicated theologian equated studying natural history with praising God’s creations. The inconvenience of extinct species in fossil records predating Noah and the Flood he attributed to limited space aboard the Ark.
In January 1823, the great man travelled to the Gower, to a cave – Paviland – he’d heard contained ancient marvels. The previous year, two men – a doctor and a curate – had found millennia-old animal bones, including the tusk of an ‘elephant’.
Buckland was excited. He arrived in a hurry – he had one or two days to spend there – but his efforts were magnificently rewarded. Digging through colourful loam, he began to come across human bones missed by previous digs: ‘nearly the entire left side of a human female skeleton’. What’s more, the bones were stained dark brick-red by some kind of iron oxide – whether via natural causes, or purposefully covered over with the compound at interment, he could not say.
Even greater riches awaited. For accompanying this body were ornaments and jewellery: rings and rods of ivory; small shells that crumbled at slightest touch. Precious grave goods.
He knew this to be an ancient human skeleton; but – his beliefs were non-negotiable – it had to be younger than the Great Flood. What’s more, with its trinkets and baubles, it had to be a woman. As Alice quotes from a letter he wrote to the British Archaeological Association, ‘There never was, nor ever will be a period, when, even among uncivilized races, the female part of our species were not, and will not be, anxious to decorate themselves with beads’.
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.
So, let’s establish a couple of things here.
Firstly, if you’re enjoying this story, you’ll devour Ancestors: the least dry book about bones (and ancient burials) you’ll read.
Secondly, yes – Ancestors is all about prehistory, intriguingly related by Alice Roberts through seven ancient burials. There’s the ‘Amesbury Archer’, a middle-aged man who died more than 4,000 years ago, buried a mile from Stonehenge. When archaeologists were called in as part of routine building practice – a new school was planned – they weren’t expecting to uncover a ‘gleam of gold’. Nor, as they carefully smoothed soil away, were they any less jubilantly taken aback to find a grave stuffed with objects – bone, stone, copper, gold; 18 beautifully worked flint arrowheads; the remains of five distinctive pottery beakers; copper knives, a shale ring: almost 100 individual relics. Untold riches that signified, as archaeologist Andrew Fitzpatrick described, an early Bronze Age man ‘of a wealth and status that was hitherto unimagined’.
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.)
Ancestors is about an ancient world. But it’s also about 21st-century technology that’s as revealing as if the bodies themselves were to sit up in their graves and talk.
It’s a mind-boggling read for us today.
But just imagine how amazed William Buckland would be to discover that he was wrong on almost every count when it came to his Red Lady.
PROFESSOR ALICE Roberts – TV presenter, anatomist, biological anthropologist, professor of public engagement of science in Birmingham – can’t stand the term ‘cavemen’. She almost physically shudders across the Zoom-ways.
‘They didn’t live in caves and they weren’t all men. But there you go,’ she says, with trademark good humour.
In her book, Ancestors, she shows how, time and again, prehistory has been egregiously misrepresented. And not just by early practitioners such as William Buckland. Prehistoric humans have a tendency to be lumped together even in the modern mind: a single Fred Flintstone stereotype, all animal-skins and stone clubs.
Madness, when you think about it.
‘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.’
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.
‘There’s a Greek called Pytheas who sailed up past Britain, which he calls Britannica -the first recorded use of the word - who gives us a bit of a glimpse. This is in the 4th Century BCE. He says he sails even further north and gets to somewhere the sun never sets.’
That outlandish claim was mocked by Strabo – a later Greek geographer/philosopher – as bonkers. Of course there’s nowhere where the sun never sets!
Alice grins. ‘We read it now and think: Pytheas could very well have got up to Shetland, with its white nights. Just extraordinary.’
But if we’re really going to understand our prehistoric ancestors, archaeology is where it’s at. ‘The physical remains of the ancestors themselves, and all of their amazing culture.’
An archaeology that – as technology advances almost into the realms of sci-fi – increasingly doesn’t need words inscribed on wax tablets to tell the stories of humans who lived thousands of years BCE.
One of many fascinations of Alice’s writing is the description of the radiocarbon-dating revolution, first developed in the 40s. Prior to that, archaeologists had to piece together, as well as they could, the ages of artefacts and bones through their relative position in the ground, or by comparing styles. Today, that technology is even more advanced: Alice’s friend and colleague Professor Alistair Pike, based at Southampton University, has now dated cave paintings in Iberia to at least 25,000 years before the arrival of modern humans. In other words, Alice explains, ‘Neanderthals were cave-painting 60,000 years ago. Just unbelievable.’
It’s an even more recent breakthrough that particularly fascinates her: ancient genomics. The science of reading ancient DNA.
IT’S THROUGH a mix of new science and some good old-fashioned anatomy that Alice Roberts opens up secrets of the grave.
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.
His discoverer, Buckland, was not only misled by his religious beliefs; he was also skewed by cultural bias. And Buckland is far from the only archaeologist whose results have been skewed in that way. Another stereotype-busting set of examples Alice describes involves chariot burials: Iron Age chariots buried to honour the deceased, in one case complete with the bones of two ponies. The temptation is to assume these were charioteers; and, by another leap of logic, male charioteers.
‘Maybe if they’d been excavated 150 years ago, archaeologists would have been saying: This is definitely a man; must have been a chieftain.’
But, hold your horses.
There are some 25 known chariot burials in Britain, 11 of which have been sexed. Of these, three are female – nearly a third.
Now let’s return to the ‘wealthy’ Amesbury Archer, whom you can visit today in Salisbury Museum. Isotopic analysis threw up a twist in his story, too. His teeth – as do all teeth – reflected the rocks through which the water he once drank had percolated; the rocks on which the food he ate was grown. He was buried near Stonehenge, yet his teeth indicated he had spent his childhood somewhere around the Alps. How he ended life in England – revered and honoured – we just don’t know.
While individual stories are beyond our ken, a new research project at the Crick Institute in London is looking fully to sequence 1,000 ancient genomes, ‘no stretch of DNA unread’ – the most ambitious archaeological genetic project ever carried out in this country. Once completed, it will reveal more than ever before the sweeping history of people living in Britain – comings and goings over millennia; connections; recent common ancestry; migrations of long ago.
THE FUNNY THING IS, as inaccessible as prehistoric peoples might seem today, their culture still defines our landscape. In hillforts; in long barrows.
‘If you’re interested in prehistory, and if you happen to be in the Cotswolds, you’re in the perfect place because you’ve got so much. One of my favourite things is to go for walks – I’m constantly dragging my children along. And walk isn’t a walk without a monument.
Indeed, Alice Roberts was up at Uley Camp just the other weekend. ‘What a fantastic hillfort – the views are absolutely stunning!
‘I like to see hillforts as Iron Age castles; but also maybe places where animals were overwintered. Some have hut circles so we know there were people living in them. You get this impression that those Iron Age people didn’t just go for the first hill – they had a look around and went: This is the one with the view.’
Then there are mystical tombs – tombs like the ones described in Ancestors: Hetty Pegler’s Tump in Uley, which you can stoop down and crawl into to experience its inky blackness for yourself. Or Belas Knap on Cleeve Hill.
‘Those Neolithic burials are about making a statement in the landscape. They’re about territory; about saying: This is ours; this has always been ours. This is where our family has been for many generations, and this is our family tomb.
‘Without being too territorial about it, if you live in a certain place and you go out for walks, you’re communing with the ancestors.
‘You’re linking yourself back to them through the landscape.’
Alice Roberts is touring her new book, Ancestors, across the UK, including dates in Swindon and Worcester. For tickets, visit alice-roberts.co.uk
You can catch the latest TV series of Digging for Britain with Alice Roberts at BBC iPlayer.
