Alice Roberts, one of the UK’s leading public scientists, talks to Samira Shackle about what we can learn from the burial sites of the earliest Britons, as explored in her new book ‘Ancestors’. What does our prehistory – cannibalism and all - tell us about who we are? How does the way we mark death illuminate our perspective on life? And how are genetics and archaeology shaping each other today? Plus, Alice tells Samira how she came to be a humanist, and discusses the value of storytelling and science communication in our pandemic age, and beyond.
Podcast listeners can get a year's subscription to New Humanist magazine for just £13.50. Head to newhumanist.org.uk/subscribe and enter the code WITHREASON
Reading list:
Alice Roberts, ‘Ancestors: A Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials’ (2021)
Alice Roberts and Andrew Copson, ‘The Little Book of Humanism: Universal Lessons on Finding Purpose, Meaning and Joy’ (2020)
David Reich ‘Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human’ (2018)
Peter Forbes ‘What Ancient DNA says about us’, New Humanist magazine (2018)
‘Digging for Britain’ presented by Alice Roberts
Alice Roberts is President of Humanists UK
Hosts: Samira Shackle and Niki Seth-Smith
Executive producer: Alice Bloch
Sound engineer: David Crackles
Music: Danosongs
Image: Photo by Dave Stevens, artwork by Ed Dingli
Inside The New Space Race, with Nicholas Schmidle
Black Resistance and Racist Policing, with Adam Elliott-Cooper
(M)otherhood and Choice, with Pragya Agarwal
Quantum Physics & Philosophy, with Carlo Rovelli
Bonus: Rutger Bregman and Philippe Sands - Are Humans Naturally Good? From How To Academy
Why our minds need the wild, with Lucy Jones
How to Fix the Internet, with Chris Bail
Writing and Recovery, with Michael Rosen
The Cosmos & Us, with Jo Marchant
Deporting Black Britons, with Luke de Noronha
Activism and Belief, with Rosemary Hancock
Desire in the age of Consent, with Katherine Angel
Looking back in anger at 'Cool Britannia' with Jason Arday
Escaping the logic of work, with Mareile Pfannebecker
Sensuous knowledge and black feminism, with Minna Salami
The symbolic power of charity, with Jon Dean
Taking sex robots seriously, with Kate Devlin
Faith, fraternity and the Orange Order, with Joe Webster
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