Alice Roberts - Ancestors: A prehistory of Britain in seven burials

Professor Alice Roberts

Ancestors

The Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials

Terrific, timely and transportingBettany Hughes

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2021

Copyright Alice Roberts, 2021

The right of Alice Roberts to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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The author and publishers have made all reasonable efforts to contact copyright-holders for permission, and apologise for any omissions or errors in the form of credits given. Corrections may be made to future printings.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Hardback ISBN : 978-1-4711-8801-5

eBook ISBN : 978-1-4711-8803-9

For Linda

Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.

Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey, 2019

Some of the clues to our past, our ancestry, lie buried deep underground. They may never be discovered. They may already have disintegrated, merging with the soil, dissolving into groundwater, rendered into fragments of molecules, before anyone ever had the chance to catch them.

Others have been prised out of the earth, though. The bones of ordinary and extraordinary people from long ago, whose antiquity and miracle of preservation guarantees them sacred status. They are kept in boxes in museums new acid-free cardboard coffins to contain the relics that have been lifted from their original resting places. Strange codes are scrawled onto the outside of the boxes, identifying the contents by place and date of discovery. Sometimes, someone will come and check the boxes, opening them to look at the contents, making a note, then replacing the lid. Occasionally, someone will take a box down, and remove the bones for more careful inspection. They might take a piece of bone or a tooth away with them.

Or some bones are laid out with reverence, in glass display cases, in the public spaces. And devout pilgrims make journeys to see them, to contemplate the vastness of time past, the strangeness of old ways, the inevitable fact of human mortality. Our visits to museums, to gaze on such human remains, are a form of ancestor worship.

But the contemplation goes beyond mere looking. We can extract information from those ancient bones. We can scan them for clues to the identity of the dead carefully recording the shape and texture of the bones, measuring them, comparing them. And they contain another sort of information too the sort written in chains of nucleotides at a molecular level. Another strange code, in fragments that we have learned to assemble and decrypt until we have in our hands the genome of a person who died many centuries ago, redolent with meaning and mystery.

Rather too often, perhaps, we think of Britain beginning with the arrival of the Romans. But that is a historical artefact its with the Romans that we start to have written records. Thats when British history in the sense of that documentary evidence of the past begins. But archaeology allows us to push back into the unwritten past, into prehistory. And there, we uncover stories written in stone, pottery, metal and bone.

This book is about exploring changing prehistoric funerary rites through time uncovering a prehistory of Britain through burials, but also exploring what those burials mean. Its about how people came and went from this island. Ill also explore the history of ideas about the human past, and find out how ideas are transformed by archaeological discoveries and new ways of interrogating the evidence. Ill look at how advances in genetics are transforming archaeology, and Ill let you in on the inception of an exciting and ambitious ancient DNA project.

This book is also about belonging; about walking in ancient places, in the footsteps of the ancestors. Its about reaching back in time, to find ourselves, and our place in the world.

Almost a year since we first met, I am meeting Pontus Skoglund again.

The first time was at Cheltenham, at the science festival, along with a gathering of people whod been intrigued enough by the title of our event in the programme to buy a ticket and turn up. Our subject was Mapping the Human Journey. We were joined by geneticist and writer Adam Rutherford and archaeologist Brenna Hassett, and for an hour we all talked about how archaeology and genetics were colliding and creating sparks. We were seeing more depth and complexity than ever before in the story of human origins, the colonisation of the globe by our forebears, the endless movement and migrations the restlessness of the past.

These once-disparate spheres of enquiry were fusing to create something new; something that went beyond the sum of its parts; a magnificent new alloy.

Archaeology in all its grimy earthiness. With a slightly musty aura. Dirt under the fingernails. Objects and ancient bones prised from the ground. Dusty boxes tucked away under desks, secreted away in museum stores, full of ancient remains waiting to be discovered again. Heavy with history and tradition.

Genetics in all its clinical brightness. Born out of white-walled labs where robots labour inside glass-walled chambers to polymerise, synthesise and decrypt. The molecules that make us stretched out, broken up, translated from chemical into digital archives. The cold white heat of technology, dazzling us with its intensity. Brave and brash in its newness.

Fusion is difficult to achieve. But it creates astonishing energy when it happens.

Were in the Crick Institute.

Its like a cathedral, this place. Or a monastery. Hushed conversations murmur at the fringes of audibility. Sunlight glances down from the high glass roof. A few high bridges cross the vast space of the central atrium, and Im sitting in a booth on one of them. On each side of the atrium, glass-walled, cloistered offices and labs. Thats where the work takes place the careful drilling, detection, decoding. This is where the letters are assembled into words and sentences; where the scribes toil away assembling a vast library of life and death.

Pontus could be a monk, I think, as he approaches. He exudes a certain calmness. He has a knowing quality to him, too, as though he has imbibed all the wisdom contained in the library; as though he knows the answers to questions I havent even thought of yet. He sits down in the booth elegantly, folding up his long limbs. Two initiates join us, sitting on the other side of the table. Pontus introduces me to them: Pooja Swali and Tom Booth. Together, they are just about to start work on the most ambitious archaeological genetic project that has ever been carried out in Britain. They are hoping to sequence a thousand ancient genomes. And to fully sequence them leaving no stone unturned, no stretch of DNA unread. Its only two decades since the first single human genome was sequenced. Sequencing is so much faster now, with the ability to compile DNA libraries drawn from the living and the dead.