Ancestors with Professor Alice Roberts | 91TV
Transcript
- Thank you so much, Carlos. I'm just so delighted to be with you all this evening and to being
- awarded the first ever Royal Society David Attenborough Prize for Public Engagement last
- year. In 2015, one of the highlights of my career was interviewing David Attenborough at the Science
- Museum for an event that was organised by the Royal Society of Biology. I've got a picture of
- that, but for some reason it's not showing it. So I'm just going to stop my share and try sharing
- again, if that's all right? So let me just share this again and see if it works this time. Yes,
- there we have it. So this is just such an amazing evening for me. I think, like many people,
- I'd grown up inspired by Sir David Attenborough, inspired by his passion for the natural world,
- inspired by his extraordinary abilities as a communicator. So it really is a huge
- honour to receive this award that carries his name, and from the Royal Society, of course,
- and I'm really sorry not to have been able to deliver a live lecture at the Royal Society,
- for obvious reasons, but I'm very glad to be here for this virtual event, and I look forward
- to a time when I might be able to come and give an in-person lecture. On the other hand, I know that
- there are many audience members here tonight who perhaps wouldn't have been able to make an event
- at the Royal Society, so that's wonderful as well. I'm going to talk a little bit about what burials
- can tell us about life and death in prehistoric Britain, and that's the subject of my new book,
- Ancestors, but I'm also going to talk about how archaeology and genetics come together to allow
- us to map ancient migrations and ancient human journeys, but I am going to start
- with my own anthropological journey. As Carlos mentioned, I started out as a medical doctor,
- and then I became an anatomist and a biological anthropologist. I thought I wouldn't show any gory
- pictures of anatomy tonight. This is just anatomy that I've painted on my own arm. As well as being
- a biological anthropologist and anatomist, I've become a broadcaster and a writer as well,
- and over the course of my career I've found myself exploring the fascinating landscape
- of intellectual inquiry, where biology meets archaeology and history, and this is the area
- of science that really fascinates me, this kind of collision of different disciplines.
- So I was originally a doctor. I was lured into academia by anatomy, the science of the human
- body, the structure of the human body, and old bones as well, and also through a love
- of teaching. I still love teaching. I'm still very active teaching undergraduates at the
- University of Birmingham, but as a young lecturer alongside teaching anatomy, I became fascinated
- in archaeological human remains and what they can tell us about ancient societies. I think
- right from the very beginning of that academic career, I felt that universities should be about
- more than just their own staff and students. So I was doing teaching, I was doing research,
- but I felt quite strongly that universities should be engaging with the wider community, and that
- actually universities and researchers have so much to give and so much to learn, as well, by engaging
- with wider audiences. So, alongside teaching and research, I've always practised outreach,
- whether that's into schools, into cities and communities, at festivals, and since 2001 in
- television and then also through writing books. My first appearance on television came with the
- Channel 4 series, Time Team, and it was back in 2001, so that incredibly long-running series,
- Time Team. To begin with, I was writing reports on the bones that they were digging up, and then
- in 2001 I was invited along to an excavation of an Anglo-Saxon cemetery in Hampshire, and then I
- continued as a contributor on Time Team, but then went on to present my own programmes as well,
- and those include several landmark series on the BBC, ranging across British archaeology, in Coast,
- Digging for Britain, and a series on the Celts, to much more evolutionary approaches to the subject,
- and often delving right back into human evolutionary history as well. My first
- landmark series came along in 2008, 2009 with The Incredible Human Journey on BBC Two. What
- I wanted to do with that series was to tell this very ancient story of humans and how
- humans colonised the entire globe, how we could trace those ancient migrations, and of course,
- these are happening way back in prehistory, so there's nothing written down about these ancient
- migrations. We only have archaeology and other related disciplines to try to uncover that story,
- which goes right back into the old Stone Aage, the Palaeolithic, many tens of thousands,
- even hundreds of thousands of years ago. So it's a story that shows us how our ancestors
- arise in Africa and then colonised the entire globe during the Stone Age, so it's also a story
- about how resilient, resourceful and innovative our ancestors were. This story can be written
- today using different strands of science, so using palaeoanthropology, which includes the study
- of fossil bones, but also artefacts like stone tools, but also, really importantly, genetics,
- which 12 years ago, 12, 13 years ago when we were making the series, was just starting to provide
- us with some really fascinating revelations. I will talk a little bit more about those,
- and also about some of the revelations that have emerged in just over a decade since I made that
- series. In the course of filming that series, I had the amazing privilege of seeing some of
- the evidence up close for myself, seeing important fossils. So here I am in Indonesia, in the in the
- museum at Jakarta, holding the skull LB1, found on the island of Flores in Indonesia, that led to the
- realisation that a completely previously-unknown species had been around in Southeast Asia
- before modern humans got there, and potentially overlapping with the arrival of modern humans as
- well. So this species is called Homo floresiensis, the humans of Florès, in other words.
- You can see by that skull in my hands just how small this skull is. It's an adult skull,
- and the brain is absolutely tiny, about half-a-litre in capacity. My brain, most of
- your brains are about one-and-a-half litres in capacity. So this species really threw the cat
- among the pigeons in terms of what we thought we understood about brain size and human evolution,
- because we didn't really think that humans with brains this small would be able to make
- stone tools, and yet we've got incontrovertible evidence of that happening in Indonesia. So it's
- interesting when I think we make these new discoveries and it challenges what we think
- we already know. I was also really privileged to travel with cultural anthropologists and to stay
- with a range of communities in different parts of the world, and to be able to have conversations,
- usually via translation, of course, with lots of different people from different cultures,
- including here the hunter-gatherers from the Ju'huonsi of Namibia, the Orang Asli of Indonesia,
- the indigenous people of Indonesia and Malaysia, Hadza people in Tanzania - I was filming there
- with Alyssa Crittenden, amazing anthropologist who knew this group incredibly well, and they
- welcomed us as friends, which was just wonderful - and the Evenki in Siberia in rather a different
- type of landscape, and they are hunter-herders. Those encounters were quite seminal for me.
- They opened my eyes and made me think very differently about archaeology, to begin with,
- but also actually about my own culture and my own society. In the intervening period,
- over the last 12 to 13 years, there's been an avalanche of new discoveries, new fossils,
- new archaeological assemblages, stone tools, those sorts of things. Also, of course, advances in
- in the scientific technology that we can use to unlock secrets from all of these sources,
- and also a tidal wave - and it's been growing, but it's really reaching us now - a tidal wave
- of new genetic discoveries. So just here, I've got examples of new fossil finds from Morocco,
- down there in the bottom-left, which have pushed back the earliest evidence that we have for our
- species. So when I was filming 13 years ago, the earliest fossil evidence that we had for
- Homo sapiens was almost 200,000 years old, and these fossil remains from Jebel Irhoud
- in Morocco take us back to around 300,000 years ago. So we've got earlier evidence
- of our own species and interesting clues about how our species gradually evolved,
- with different features accumulating over time. We're also now looking at an all-Africa origin
- for our species, so that's quite different to the story12 years ago, when really we were
- still looking at East Africa as the cradle of humanity. That's what we used to think,
- but now we've seen that there are modern human fossils and traces of modern human behaviour,
- in fact, all across Africa. The other thing that's really changed is the date for the expansion of
- the human population, and when we start to pick up evidence of modern humans in places outside of
- Africa. So we think that people started to - modern humans, Homo sapiens - started to
- expand out of Africa - obviously, there's a huge population that's still left in Africa. I say,
- huge; it's not huge by modern standards, but this population started to expand out of Africa, when
- the environment is right, just like other animals do. There's nothing particularly exceptional about
- that expansion out of Africa. We can cast it in terms of heroism and adventuring, but other
- animals were doing similar things. Other species, like elephants, were doing similar things.
- We think that expansion happened between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago, but there are now also many
- more fossils from areas outside of Africa. From Southeast Asia, there are some fossils here from
- Southeast Asia, and East Asia, showing a very, very early arrival of modern humans in those
- areas. So the earliest reliable evidence we had of modern humans in Southeast Asia, back in back
- in 2008 was around 42,000 years old, and there were some remains from a cave in Borneo. Now,
- we have sites, or fossils from sites like this one in Laos, which date back to 70,000 years ago,
- and then in China, an astonishing selection of modern human teeth. So these are very definitely
- modern human teeth that date back to more than 80,000 years ago, so that's very novel
- compared with what we were looking at in 2008 But the really big revelation of the last 11
- years has been interbreeding. So on the basis of fossils, we just didn't think back then that
- there had been any interbreeding between modern humans and other hominin species, as modern humans
- expanded out of Africa. There were some hints from the fossil record, but they weren't entirely
- persuasive, and I think most paleoanthropologists didn't believe that there was interbreeding, and
- now we know, because of DNA, that there definitely was. I think the year after Human Journey came
- out, we had the first evidence of that with the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome,
- and this is a reconstruction of a Neanderthal by the wonderful Adrie and Alphonse Kennis,
- who are paleo artists. So we know now that we, our ancestors, interbred with Neanderthals. I'm about
- 2.6 or 2.7 per cent Neanderthal in my genes. We also know now, actually fairly recent revelations,
- that there are traces of Neanderthal DNA in African genomes as well, which even when we
- had the first revelations about Neanderthals interbreeding, we didn't know that. So now
- we're seeing the possibility of back-migrations into Africa, incorporating that Neanderthal DNA.
- Then, what's been quite astonishing is that, as we've been able to extract DNA and sequence DNA
- from other hominin species, basically, every time we look we're finding evidence of interbreeding.
- So it's, I think, made us think quite differently about human species, but actually about species
- more generally and biology, because genetics is showing us this very widely. It's showing us that
- hybridisation is actually the rule rather than the exception. So we used to think of species as being
- very definite entities, very hard edges, perhaps very bounded, and now we're thinking much more in
- terms of some fluidity. The species concept still stands, but we still have this hybridisation going
- alongside that. Perhaps the Neanderthals weren't as different from us as we used to
- think. They're often cast as being grunting brutes, and I think that's extremely unfair.
- From a biological point of view, they're not that much different to us. Their brain size
- is about the same size as ours, if not slightly larger, actually, than the modern humans that were
- around at the time, and their culture is different from ours, but it's not inferior. I think that, in
- recent years, there's been particularly compelling evidence that Neanderthals are closer to us than
- perhaps we previously thought, coming from evidence of Neanderthal art. So from three caves
- in different parts of Spain, we've had evidence of cave paintings that date to at least 65,000 years
- old. Now, this is cave paintings in Europe. At that date, modern humans were not in Spain 65,000
- years ago. So you have to look around at who could have done it, and it's the Neanderthals. So
- those cave paintings have been dated by dating the calcium carbonate that's formed on top of the art,
- and we can just imagine those Neanderthals painting the walls of their caves,
- painting themselves, perhaps, but I think that connection back to those other ancient people
- through art is quite extraordinary and very personal, and suddenly we
- see them as humans, much more like us, I think. Now, I haven't had the chance to update The Human
- Journey on television, although I have done some other programmes - I did a Horizon programme which
- showcased some of the recent revelations I've just been talking about - but I have been able
- to write a relatively recent book about the human journey again. So I published a book for adults at
- the same time as the series, and then last year I published a book for younger readership, and so I
- was able to include all the new discoveries in there, and also tell this amazing story which,
- for me, is all about the family of humanity and the deep connections that we have with all of
- our cousins - everybody around the world is a cousin - and able to tell that story for a new
- generation. In this book, I collaborated with the amazing artist, James Weston Lewis, and
- this is one of the spreads from the book, which shows an extremely important burial in Britain.
- I was really keen to include this in the book, a burial that involved many artefacts, many ivory
- artefacts placed in the grave, and we're just seeing two people there burying someone who's
- possibly their relative or a friend. It's the earliest burial in Britain, and it's one that I've
- been just fascinated with for years and years. This burial comes from a fairly epic site. It
- comes from the Gower in South Wales, on the south Welsh coast, and these are wonderful pictures by
- the aerial photographer, David Abram, who uses a drone to take these fantastic images. if we just
- get a closer look at this cliff at Paviland, on the Gower, you can see there this teardrop
- shape - there it is - that is the entrance to Paviland Cave, or Goat's Hole it's properly
- called. This is where, in the early 19th century, the most ancient burial that we know of in Britain
- was discovered by an antiquarian. This antiquarian was a geologist who was also interested in
- archaeology, and a bit of a character himself. He was the Reverend William Buckland. He visited
- the cave in Paviland Cliffs in 1823, where a group of locals had already started digging,
- and they turned up some curiously-large bones, and then written to him and told him about
- their discoveries. Actually, actually when I was researching this, although it's Buckland's name
- that is definitely associated with this discovery, and he wrote it up and he published it, the first
- finds of the Pleistocene, Ice Age fauna, were made by a woman, were made by Mary Theresa Talbot, and
- as is so often the case, the women fade away out of our history of science. So in my latest book,
- I have written them back in. Mary Theresa Talbot was the oldest daughter of the landowner on the
- Gower, Lady Mary Cole, and it was she that had been in touch with Buckland about these caves,
- having been interested to hear that Buckland was discovering ancient fauna in caves in Yorkshire.
- So Buckland eventually makes it down to the Gower, and he does some more excavating there. Very
- rushed compared with how we would excavate today. He digs down through the yellowish cave earth and
- then comes upon a deeper layer which contains lots of seashells and also bones. Among those bones
- there were parts of the skull of what he called an elephant - it was a mammoth - but then there was a
- bit of a surprise in store, because human bones started to turn up completely unexpectedly. He
- wasn't expecting to find any human bones in that cave. He didn't think that humans existed at the
- same time as those ancient animals. So this cave is limestone. Its floor is yellowish sediment,
- but the bones were stained red and coated in what Buckland called ruddle, and close to the thigh
- bone he found a couple of handfuls of periwinkle shells, and then around the ribs there were around
- 50 fragments of small pieces of ivory rods, long ivory cylinders. The longest one is about ten
- centimetres long. Also, fragments of ivory rings, and the whole lot stained red like the bones.
- Now, Buckland's first impression was that this burial was that of a man,
- and perhaps he suggested a murdered excise man. There were plenty of stories of violent clashes
- between smugglers and excise men around the coast at the time, but then, just a few weeks
- later, he seemed to change his mind. He writes to Lady Mary Cole - and all of this correspondence
- exists, so we can read this correspondence between Buckland and Lady Mary - and he says,
- actually, now he thinks the bones are female, and he goes off on a complete flight of fancy
- about this woman having been a witch, and then possibly running a gambling den in the cave.
- He even goes as far as to say to Lady Mary Cole that she ought to write a novel about it, because
- it's so exciting. As for the date of the burial, Buckland was absolutely convinced that the burial
- could not be contemporary, with those bones of ancient animals that he'd he found. So he thought
- that humans may have existed a long time ago, at the same time as those ancient animals, but
- elsewhere. He thought that humans may have existed in the Middle East, but certainly not in Britain.
- So he's wrestling with these ideas. I mean, it's early on in the science of geology and
- archaeology, but Buckland is approaching them very much as a creationist. So he's not thinking about
- evolution. He's not a young-earth creationist. So he believes that the earth is older than just a
- few thousand years, and he thinks that geology is telling us that. He accepts that geology is
- saying that the earth has this deep antiquity, but he thinks that animals and that humans are still
- appearing by divine creation, and that humans are a relatively last edition, and only spread across
- the world, crucially, after Noah's flood, so after the great flood described in the Bible. He writes
- to Lady Mary Cole and says, 'Look, we've got to be really firm about this. We can't admit our
- red woman,' as he was calling her by then, 'to be antediluvian, to be somebody from before the
- flood.' So she had to be later, in his eyes. He could not accept in his chronologies - his idea
- of chronology - that she was that old. So he thought the burial was about 2000 years old.
- So, to be fair to Buckland, because we can look back at people in the 19th century and raise
- our eyebrows and perhaps even laugh at their ideas, but he's dealing with the evidence he's
- got available, and he's trying to fit it into a framework. Although he's trying to shoehorn
- science into the Bible, eventually, much later in his career, he recognises that he was wrong about
- the biblical flood. So he's persuaded later on that the landscape features that he thought were
- all about a great universal flood, are actually about repeated Ice Ages, are about glaciations.
- So in the end he proved himself to be a true scientist. He changed his mind in the face of
- the evidence He'd been wrong about Noah's flood, and he accepted the evidence for glaciation,
- but one thing he never did quite get to the bottom of was this conundrum of this burial. This burial,
- this individual, became known as the Red Lady of Paviland. That conundrum would take about
- almost two centuries to unravel, with a story that takes us right, right back into the Ice Age, when
- glaciation, those repeated Ice Ages, were scouring and gouging out the British landscape and leaving
- behind those telltale signs that we can see today, the erratic boulders, the clay and gravel.
- The answer to the age of the Red Lady and who this person is, more about their biography, only comes
- when new scientific techniques could be applied to those archaeological remains, specifically a way
- of pinning a date on them, and that date arrived at by radiocarbon dating has been revised several
- times, as radiocarbon dating has become more and more accurate. The latest, most robust date that
- we have, is that the Red Lady, who was a man, I must say - I've seen the bones, it's very
- definitely a male skeleton - Buckland's initial hunch was right - that man died an astonishing,
- not 2000 years ago, 34,000 years ago. So right, right back in the depths of the Ice Age, and in
- fact, before the great ice sheets descended right down over South Wales. The style of the burial
- is just fascinating. There are echoes there with other burials right across Europe and into Russia,
- in other graves, which again contain ochre. This ochre is being added to the grave. We
- see it being sprinkled in there. It may have been the clothes that were dyed, perhaps,
- but also shell beads and the bones of large mammals as well, accompanying these graves.
- So we don't see a lot of these graves. They hint at the special treatment of just a few
- chosen individuals, and then we wonder why those individuals were special. Could they have been
- leaders or chieftains or priests or shamans? But equally, actually, he could have been
- singled out because he died a bad death, perhaps, something like that. So we tend to think in heroic
- terms, but it may have been less heroic. I don't think we'll ever get to the bottom of the reason,
- but we need to cast our net wide and entertain as many hypotheses as possible. So we need to
- approach this scientifically, generate hypotheses, reject some if we can, but then keep it alive.
- What we know, is that whoever was burying him, clearly, this burial held huge meaning,
- huge significance for them. So I want to finish this evening with another burial, which seems,
- I think, more familiar to us in some ways. It's much, much closer to us in time than it is to
- the Red Lady of Paviland, but still happened way back in prehistory, taking us back to the
- very early Bronze Age, but a very, very different time from the time of the Red Lady of Paviland.
- The Red Lady of Paviland is around everybody is subsisting by hunter-gathering. The next burial
- I'm going to show you comes from a time when this massive revolution had happened, I think the
- biggest revolution to have ever been experienced by humanity, the transition to farming. So we've
- already had that transition to farming, and then actually we're into the beginnings, the very, very
- earliest beginnings, of metalworking in Britain. So this burial was discovered back in 2002, and it
- was discovered fairly close to Stonehenge, where archaeologists from the Wessex Archaeology Unit
- were, to begin with, carrying out a fairly low-key excavation of a site to the southeast of Amesbury,
- where a new school was going to be built. So this is very standard practice in the UK. Developers
- have to build in archaeological assessment of sites and they're applying for planning
- permission, and I must say, some of our most amazing archaeological discoveries have come about
- in that way, and it's really, really important that archaeology is preserved in planning,
- in the way that we develop and construct. So in this case, it's very fortunate that
- Wessex Archaeology were already doing a thorough excavation, as they found something that required
- enormous skill and patience to excavate. They'd already found some Roman graves, so they knew
- they were dealing with some burials, but this one turned out to be a much earlier and much
- more elaborate burial. They knew from early on it was quite special. They were digging one afternoon
- and they saw the glint of gold in the burial, and then they just kept finding more and more finds,
- alongside a complete skeleton, and it was clear they wouldn't finish before nightfall. Now,
- archaeologists don't like to carry on working in the dark, but they knew they wouldn't get
- this job finished, and they were worried about the security of the site, so they carried on, and you
- can see here digging illuminated by torches and car headlights, and worked on late into the night.
- By the time they finished, they knew they'd found something exceptional. This is the
- skeleton of this individual, with some objects around him. I can turn him around like that,
- and perhaps you can make out the details a bit better. You've got the skull at the top here,
- you've got the arm bones coming down here, and then the thigh bones here, and then down to the
- feet. You can see these kinds of objects lying around him. These are completely crushed pots.
- So he's buried with a whole series of pots. By the time they'd finished excavating, they knew they'd
- found something utterly exceptional. At home on the Saturday morning, the project manager,
- Andrew Fitzpatrick, went through the literature just to make sure that what he thought about
- this burial was true, and it was. It's the most richly-furnished Bronze Age grave ever discovered
- in Britain, and I think in Europe as well. So analysis of the bones and the objects
- associated with this body, provide us with an incredible picture of this man, a real biography
- of this man and his culture. The grave is full of objects, and you can see that probably a bit
- better in this drawing that I've done, where I've just taken out some of the clutter, and we can
- see that there's a whole range of artefacts around that individual. Artefacts made of bone, artefacts
- made of stone, of copper and gold. He must have been fully-clothed when he was laid in the ground,
- but the organic material has all rotted away, and it's only the more resilient materials that stick
- around as clues. Our analysis of his bones revealed some interesting details. The bony
- prominence on his shoulder blades, that you can feel up here, the highest point of the scapula,
- is actually separate from the rest of the scapula. It would have been attached by cartilage,
- but it hadn't fused to the rest of the bone. That is a condition known as os acromiale,
- and it could be associated with heavy use of the shoulder, and frequent and heavy use of
- these shoulder muscles, deltoid and over the back trapezius, which may prevent the bone from fusing.
- His left kneecap was missing, and it really was. It wasn't just that the archaeologists didn't find
- it that night in the gleam of the car headlights; it was missing. His bones around the knee,
- the thigh bone and the tibia below that, are misshapen. So it's possible that he suffered an
- injury to the knee and that the kneecap itself completely disintegrated, but the injury would
- certainly have affected his gait. So you've got a man that would have walked with a limp,
- and his left leg is withered in comparison to the right. So what we can see from this
- very lavish grave is that that disability did not detract from his status. He was buried in
- the most lavish grave that we've ever discovered from the British Bronze Age, and perhaps even his
- disability could have been bound up with that status. It could have been it could have been
- like a battle scar or something that marked him out, perhaps as a survivor, against the odds.
- We'll never know, but what we can say is that he has this disability and yet he has this
- incredible high status, or perhaps not yet, and he has this incredible high status. So
- perhaps he was somebody who was kind of apparently supernaturally untouchable until the very end. His
- grave contained nearly 100 objects, including the largest collection of Bronze Age archery equipment
- ever found. There were two stone wrist guards, beautifully preserved, and around the body is
- a selection of some of them here, 18 beautiful, tanged flint arrowheads, and it looks like some
- had been attached to arrows that had been laid, or perhaps thrown into the grave after the body had
- been placed in there. It was placed into a wooden chamber, originally, we know, so perhaps people
- are placing arrows as sort of offerings in the grave. He's become known as the Amesbury Archer.
- He has so much archery equipment, but he also has knives. These beautiful, copper knives, when they
- were fresh and new, they would have looked like this, and they would have had wooden handles,
- probably, and it's completely unparalleled to find three copper knives in one grave. Now,
- actually, these copper knives would not have been as functional as stone. Copper is relatively soft.
- So these are these are probably very prestigious items, but if you were actually going to go and
- cut something up, you might take a stone knife to do it instead. Then, there were five pots,
- or beakers, and these are still Bronze Age beakers. They're not the ones in his grave,
- because as you saw from the earlier pictures, they were completely crushed, but just to give you an
- idea of what these beakers are like, I think they're very beautiful. They're quite regular,
- they have this lovely bell shape. They were made before the invention of the wheel,
- so they're kind of hand-moulded, very, very beautiful objects. These pots give us the name
- for the culture associated with this man. We call it the Beaker culture. Sometimes we refer
- to the people who we see buried with these pots as Beaker people, and on the continent it tends
- to be referred to as the Bell Beaker culture. It's all really part of the same phenomenon.
- Now, the Beaker folk were once seen as invaders in Britain, kind of a warrior culture sweeping in
- to replace the indigenous population. To take control, perhaps, of the precious resources
- of metal that we have here in this island. Then that idea became very unfashionable,
- but new measurements of very old skulls and isotope studies of teeth, which can show us
- where somebody lived as a child, have actually strengthened the case for quite a significant
- role played by migration, both into Britain but also within Britain as well at this period. Then,
- now we're in this incredibly exciting time in the dawn of a new age of archaeogenomics. This
- is where we are with genetics now. Geneticists can suddenly make a massive and meaningful
- contribution to these debates that we've endlessly had about ancient human migrations,
- how cultures evolve, and this particular enduring question, who were the Beaker people?
- So just three years ago there was a massive study of 400 ancient Europeans showing that
- there was a huge genetic change in Britain after 2500 BCE. The Neolithic ancestry,
- the ancestry of the original farmers in Britain, is almost completely replaced in the Copper Age,
- or at the very earliest Bronze Age, by genomes which share ancestry with Central Europeans,
- who are also associated with this Beaker culture, and we know that their ancestors
- came originally from further east, generations back, the Pontic Steppe. So we're seeing this
- wave of migration from the steppe right across Europe, and by the time it gets to Britain,
- we're seeing it reflected in the Beaker culture, around a 90 per cent population replacement. Now,
- it sounds horrific. It sounds like these people are coming in and there's a genocide, there's
- a very quick population replacement, but that may not have been the case. It may be that we're
- looking at families coming over and settling with a way of life and connections which made
- them very successful, and that they were having more children on average than the original farmers
- in Britain, so that over time it's their DNA which replaces the DNA of the original farmers.
- So we don't know yet, and it's up to archaeologists and geneticists to work together on
- this now, to work out how dramatic or not dramatic this transition really was. Interestingly,
- the culture doesn't completely replace what went before. I some places we see these Bronze Age
- people respecting their Neolithic predecessors, inserting burials into earlier Neolithic tombs,
- that sort of thing. So the Beaker culture, the Beaker complex, is a is a new thing, but there
- is cultural continuity as well. Here are the rarest objects that were in the Archer's grave.
- Absolutely beautiful. That's that gleam of gold. They used to be thought of as earrings. They're
- about 2, 2.5cm long and quite frail, actually - beaten gold - but they might be hair wraps,
- or perhaps even wrapped around the shafts of big feathers. For instance, eagle feathers in a
- headdress. There's lots and lots of possibilities here. I rather like the headdress possibility. The
- style is interesting. They're very much part of the Beaker culture, but they're a British, they're
- a local flavour of that. A very distinct British design compared with ones on the continent.
- What about the Archer himself then, where does he come from? Now, astonishingly,
- science can provide us with an answer to this too. The chemical signature in his teeth, together with
- the style of his grave goods, suggest that he grew up a long way away, somewhere around the Alps,
- around 800 miles away from Amesbury, so we know he's made that long journey over the course of his
- lifetime. He may have made longer journeys even, but we know where he grew up and we know where
- he was buried. What extraordinary biographical details to be able to extract from this burial to
- reconstruct who this man was, so many thousands of years after he died, leaving us no other traces,
- and certainly no written records. So our deep British history is a lot more complex than one
- group of people being replaced by another group over and over through time, and yet we can see
- how culture over time was shaped by the arrival of immigrants, immigrants like the Amesbury Archer.
- I think, if this deep history has got anything to tell us about ourselves today, it's that nothing
- stays the same, that people have always arrived in these islands, and wherever you are in the world,
- that's always the case as well, and that we're just the latest inheritors of all of that history.
- So I'm going to leave you with this image of the Amesbury Archer, the drawing that I made of the
- man lying in his timber-lined grave, as perhaps he would have looked on the day that he was buried,
- with his arrows and bundles there, and his beautiful pottery beakers, his copper knives, his
- gold wraps, and he lies right at the dawn there of metalworking in Britain. He came here with tales
- of far-off lands, and he stayed, perhaps, as a shaman for a community, someone with the ability
- to create a new and mysterious substance - metal - out of stone. How extraordinary that must have
- been when the first metal emerged into culture. If you go on a pilgrimage to Salisbury Museum,
- you can see him laid out just as he was in his tomb, with all the astonishing grave goods
- arranged around him. I'd urge you to do it, if you can. It's a form of modern ancestor worship. So
- there he lies, the warrior smith from the dawn of the Copper Age, 43 centuries ago. A metal-bending,
- bow-wielding, time-travelling magician. So thank you very much indeed for listening to
- my tales of ancient ancestors this evening, and thank you again to the Royal Society.
- I'm just so honoured to have received the inaugural David Attenborough Award. Thank you.
- Well, Alice, thank you very, very much for that wonderful, fascinating journey through our
- history. Thank you for bringing our ancestors to life, and thank you for this wonderful
- time-travel. The time of the lecture just seems to have evaporated. I'm a physicist. I work around
- time and flexibility of time, but I've never seen time stretched in such a wonderful way as
- you have done today. Now, we have time for a few questions, and I would like to remind the audience
- that you can ask questions through the Slido.com. The code, I'll remind you, is DAP, for David
- Attenborough Prize, 807. I'm going to try to get through many of your questions, as many as I can,
- in the time remaining. Now, in Slido, for those of you who are new to that, you can actually
- vote for questions that other people have asked. There is one here that comes right up at the top.
- It's actually not a question. It's a comment by Tim O'Malley that has by far the largest number
- of votes, and it says, congratulations on being the first winner of the David Attenborough Prize.
- Right. So let me start now with the questions. There's one here that is also very popular and
- actually touched upon something that you said earlier, Alice. The question is from James
- Barry and it says, what are your thoughts on the results from companies like MyTrueAncestry.com,
- who compare your DNA with that of ancient DNA samples? So what do you think of that?
- This is something that I've discussed quite a lot with my very good friend Adam Rutherford,
- actually, who is a geneticist. I think they're interesting. They're certainly interesting for
- more recent family history, and you might end up finding recent relatives all around the world,
- in fact. Whether or not you want to get in touch with those recent relatives, if they're people
- that you've fallen out of touch with or have never known to begin with, because I think it's
- a kind of odd concept that you would go and track somebody down just because they happen to be a
- long-lost cousin, second cousin. Perhaps there's a bit of fun in that, and perhaps there is something
- about families reconnecting with each other, but as you go farther back in time, I think it becomes
- less and less interesting. I think at a population level it's interesting. So it's fascinating that
- there are these fragments of Neanderthal DNA in modern human genomes, but if you get your genome
- sequenced, hoping to find some Neanderthal DNA, there will be some Neanderthal DNA in your genome.
- So you're not really learning very much, and if you're somebody who lives in Britain and
- whose ancestors have gone back quite a long way in Britain, then you might hope to maybe find
- some Viking DNA. Well, you will find some Viking DNA because the further back we go,
- we're really mixed up, so you just find this great kind of mixing. So I don't know how useful it
- really is in understanding your actual ancestry. I think that archaeology is much more useful in
- understanding that. I also think that you don't need to have genetic connections back to any of
- these ancestors. You don't need to be somebody who can trace a direct genetic connection back
- to the Amesbury Archer to feel a real connection back to that one person, that one human who was
- buried all those all those millennia and centuries ago. I think that's what I would focus on. I would
- focus on those kinds of individual stories, and the way that you can walk out into the landscape,
- into the British landscape, but in fact, anywhere, because humans have been everywhere for a very
- long time, and you can imagine people in previous cultures and previous societies
- existing in the place that you're walking today. So I think that's in some ways more meaningful.
- Thank you, Alice. I have many, many questions, and I apologise that we're not going to be able
- to go through all of those, but let me combine a few that touch upon the same theme. So there's
- three or four that I will combine into one. One comes from [?Briony/Brianna 0:42:47.0] Gardner,
- and she says, if you could have witnessed any key breakthrough or event in human
- evolutionary history, what would that be, and why? So let me combine that
- with a question from [?Kirsty 0:42:58.7] Langdale,
- what has been your favourite discovery? There's another one that, unfortunately,
- I don't have the name readily here, but there's this other question which says, what sort of
- objects would you like in your burial place? The other related question is which is, your favourite
- burial? So if you've been able to witness any breakthrough, which would that be? What is your
- favourite discovery? What is your favourite burial place, and what would you like to be buried with?
- Oh these are these are all great questions. I think that I've probably focussed on some
- of my favourite burials this evening. I think the Amesbury Archer just blows me away. I mean,
- the detail that we get, the way that that burial is such a time-capsule. In archaeology,
- we find some information about ancient cultures and the objects people were using in their
- everyday lives, from rubbish pits, from middens on settlement sites, where we find very often
- the broken remains of objects that people were using. It's very rare to see intact objects,
- or objects that were still being used, in the archaeological record. Were usually seeing refuse,
- and occasionally have sites where you see that. So the site of Must Farm in Cambridgeshire was just
- extraordinary, where there was a whole Bronze Age village which suffered a catastrophic end.
- It was burnt, and fell into a river or a lakeside,
- and there was just amazing preservation of Bronze Age houses with everything in them.
- You just don't get that, because usually, if you move house, you take stuff with you. Usually,
- if you've got precious-metal objects and they come to the end of their working life,
- you will recycle them. We're all obsessed with recycling today. It's like we're rediscovering
- what our ancestors always did. You don't throw away things which are useful, or materials which
- are useful. You recycle them into something else. So it's very rare to have that kind of snapshot,
- and the Amesbury Archer gives us that snapshot of objects that were in use, and were meaningful in
- the context of his life and his death. So I think that that is that is just extraordinary. I like
- the Amesbury Archer for other reasons as well. I'm fascinated with the origins of metalworking
- as a technology. I'd love to have seen that. I mean, how amazing? I'd love to see what those
- people were like when they were extracting metal from ore, and what other people thought about it.
- Were they magicians? Were they considered to be shamans? They must have been. It's such an
- amazing new skill and ability to be able to take metal from a stone, this extraordinary
- new material.. So I'd love to go back and see a smith, a metal smith from the dawn of the
- Copper Age. I think that would be brilliant. In terms of what I want to be buried like,
- I think I'm going to have to really respect all those people that have donated their bodies to
- medical science, that that I have dissected over the years as an anatomist as well, and I will have
- to leave my body to some medical school. If I were to be buried, though, if they don't want my body,
- I'd quite like to be buried in the style of a Bronze Age Beaker burial, and not for any kind
- of deep or meaningful reason. I would quite like one of my family to make a beautiful little pot,
- and I think that that I would have found quite moving if I was still alive. But,
- really, it's just to fool archaeologists of the future. It's just that they go, 'Oh,
- hang on a minute, there's a 4000-year gap,' and then suddenly this starts again. What's going on?
- Actually, yes, it is a way to confuse a descendant of archaeologists and
- anthropologists. The person who asked the question about your favourite
- burial, is somebody called Rebecca [?Hurdle 0:47:08.8], and she congratulates you,
- but also says she's reading Ancestors at this particular moment. So let me now move on to
- another question that is proving very popular, from George [?Dishman 0:47:22.4]. It says,
- what is the significance of the recently-found Dragon Man skull,
- and do we think it confirms a real branch of an ancestral tree, or only an unusual individual?
- I think it is significant, and I think this new skull from East Asia, which has been written
- about as potentially kind of reigniting this whole debate about human origins and the area of origin,
- but I don't think it really changes the bigger picture that we have, in terms of the emergence
- of our species, Homo sapiens, from Africa and the spread of that that species around
- the world. I think in some ways we should expect to find more evidence of other hominin
- species. We now have in the ballpark of around 20 hominin species, 20 different hominin species,
- and we shouldn't assume that that's it, and that we're not going to find evidence of more.
- We also shouldn't assume that we're not going to find more evidence of interbreeding. I think we
- will. So I think the story of human origins is going to become more complex, but I still
- think that kind of the broad-brush picture that we have of the origin of our species in Africa,
- and then spread around the world - yes, with hybridisation with other hominin species - but
- we're still talking about out of Africa. Out of Africa with hybridisation, rather than going back
- to anything like the old multiregional model, which predicted that actually modern humans,
- Homo sapiens, were going to evolve independently in lots of different areas of the world. So in
- some ways, a new fossil like that is really exciting, and it's exciting in its own right,
- but it doesn't mean that we completely tear up our existing hypotheses.
- Thank you. Alice. So the question that has floated to the top, it is, of course,
- very relevant to what you said, not involving genetics, I don't think,
- but many people want to hear what you think about this. It's from somebody called Kieran,
- and the question is, do we know when, how and where religion started?
- Oh, there's an easy answer to that. No, we don't. No, we really don't, because undoubtedly,
- it's in prehistory, because as soon as we have anything written down we can see that religion
- is there. So I think it would be foolish to suggest that there was no religion before
- you had writing. The most likely thing, thinking kind of scientifically about this, the most likely
- thing is that religion predates the written word and that once we have the written word,
- we start to see evidence of it then. You have to then think hard about what you mean by religion,
- and whether you're talking about ritual or whether you're talking about the philosophy,
- the stories that go with that. The philosophy and the stories, we won't be able to get to, we really
- won't be able to get to. In terms of ritual, we can certainly see ritual going way back,
- and burial is an example of that. Burial itself is a ritual. Most animals don't bury their dead.
- So we can see burial as being something which perhaps marks out humans, although, we have
- to be very careful about human exceptionalism, because we can also look at burial another way,
- which is that, although it is something which is quite unique, and by the time that we have
- these burials that are well-furnished and we have all grave goods in them - that seems to be very,
- very unique to, to humans - it is still part of perhaps mortuary practice that we can see in
- other species. So I talk about this a little bit in the book. Even termites will remove dead bodies
- from their nests. So other animals do do this thing of removing the dead. Perhaps the earliest
- burials we see are about that, in fact, are about simply removing a dead body, perhaps from sight,
- perhaps from smell, or perhaps from presence of mind. You don't want to look at that dead body,
- you want to cover it up. So it's very interesting looking at the origins of
- burial, and there's some fascinating research emerging now looking at Neanderthal burials.
- We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Neanderthals buried their dead as well - not
- all the time and in all places - and similarly for modern humans. Once we start having burials,
- like the burial in Paviland Cave, they're few and far between. They're quite sporadic,
- but I think they show a certain kind of - once you get things like the Paviland Cave, where you've
- got grave goods, there's quite a heavy ritual associated with that. I think most people would
- look at that and presume that there's some kind of religious aspect to it, but we actually don't
- know. When it comes to religion, I think what we can be sure of is that people were diverse,
- in the past, in their religious beliefs, as they still are today. Even people who
- describe themselves as belonging to a particular religious faith, the spectrum of that is enormous,
- if you think about it. For some people, religious faith extends to adherence to particular texts and
- a literalism when it comes to those texts, and those texts then form, not just the framework
- for their life, but their understanding about the universe, the world, and our place in it.
- For other people who belong to, effectively, the same religion, it might be much more of
- a metaphorical approach to sacred texts, and actually, their approach to the world might
- be a lot more scientific, and that religion is then fulfilling something of a moral and
- ethical function for them. Then, of course, there are people like me who are humanists, and I'm an
- atheist as well, who don't have any religion, but still have positive philosophies about the way
- that humans can treat each other. I think there probably were more atheists in the past than we
- know about. It's just that they didn't tend to write as much as the religious people did.
- Thank you, Alice. Can you say, just in a very few words,
- because we're almost out of time, and in answer to Peter's question,
- what type of evidence, archaeological or otherwise, do you wish we had, but we don't?
- I think it would have to be the ideas, that ideas don't fossilise. Once we start having history,
- we do see ideas. We see what people are writing down, but we don't see all of it. I wish you could
- look at the inside of an ancient fossil skull, and just from the traces of the brain on the inside of
- that skull, work out what somebody was thinking and believing in, and even recover their memory.
- It's utterly impossible. That is something I know that is beyond the bounds of what we will ever,
- ever be able to recover. So I regret that, but on the other hand, then you start looking for other
- ways of understanding how people were thinking in the past, and you approach that through behaviour,
- and that is the archaeology. So you look at what people were making; you look at the
- evidence for what they were doing, what their lifestyles were like. You do get I think very
- close to what people were actually thinking without ever having those ideas fossilising.
- Thank you, Alice. Well, we got quite close to what you are thinking, and thank you so much for
- your ideas this evening, and congratulations again for being awarded the very, very first
- David Attenborough Award. Thank you, all of you, for watching this evening and, of course,
- for getting involved in this conversation with your questions. I'm sorry we we're only able to
- tackle a few of those, just as a demonstration of the fascination with which we all listened
- to this wonderful lecture now. So if you would like some more lectures, if you keep watching,
- there is a lightning lecture as part of the Summer Science Exhibition. This one is on
- Mapping Tumours, by Doctor Joanna Kelly. It's coming up next on this channel, and I
- remind you that this is one of the highlights of a highlight event in the life of the Royal Society,
- which is the Summer Science Exhibition. It's digital, of course. If you go to
- RoyalSociety.org, then you will be able to see a wonderful array of activities,
- lectures, workshops, all sorts of things that I couldn't recommend more strongly. Of course,
- just to remind you finally, there is a link that you can find in the YouTube description. Sorry,
- you'll find in YouTube, with a short evaluation survey,
- where you can tell us what you thought about this event and what you think about the Royal
- Society Summer Science Exhibition. So thank you very much and good evening.
- Thank you Carlos. Thank you. Thanks, everybody.
Join author, academic and broadcaster Professor Alice Roberts for her David Attenborough lecture, Ancestors, as she journeys through time to uncover the lost stories of our prehistoric ancestors - written in stone, pottery, metal and bone.
Burials are like time capsules - each one, a physical biography, written into the skeleton. Objects placed into graves provide us with some of our clearest evidence of ancient cultures - and the science of genomics is now revolutionising our perception of the deep past. From the colonisation of the globe in the Palaeolithic to the prehistory of Britain, Alice reflects on what archaeological discoveries tell us about our ancestors and the human experience that binds us all together.
Professor Alice Roberts was the first recipient of the Royal Society’s David Attenborough award for Public Engagement in 2020. An anatomist and biological anthropologist, Alice made her television debut in the UK in 2001 and since then has written and presented a number of popular TV programmes and series. Alice has been the Professor of Public Engagement at the University of Birmingham since 2012. She has also written eleven books ranging across anatomy, evolutionary anthropology and archaeology.
About the Royal Society
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