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Ancestors: A prehistory of Britain in seven burials Kindle Edition

4.5 out of 5 stars 2,051 ratings

An extraordinary exploration of the ancestry of Britain through seven burial sites. By using new advances in genetics and taking us through important archaeological discoveries, Professor Alice Roberts helps us better understand life today.

‘This is a terrific, timely and transporting book - taking us heart, body and mind beyond history, to the fascinating truth of the prehistoric past and the present’ Bettany Hughes

We often think of Britain springing from nowhere with the arrival of the Romans. But in
Ancestors, pre-eminent archaeologist, broadcaster and academic Professor Alice Roberts explores what we can learn about the very earliest Britons, from burial sites and by using new technology to analyse ancient DNA.

Told through seven fascinating burial sites, this groundbreaking prehistory of Britain teaches us more about ourselves and our history: how people came and went and how we came to be on this island. It explores forgotten journeys and memories of migrations long ago, written into genes and preserved in the ground for thousands of years.

This is a book about belonging: about walking in ancient places, in the footsteps of the ancestors. It explores our interconnected global ancestry, and the human experience that binds us all together. It’s about reaching back in time, to find ourselves, and our place in the world.

PRE-ORDER CRYPT, THE FINAL BOOK IN ALICE ROBERTS' BRILLIANT TRILOGY OUT FEBRUARY 2024. 
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From the Publisher

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ANCESTORS

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Bettany Hughes
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Product description

Review

'This is a book everyone should read. Roberts is the new Da Vinci, able to shift between science and humanities, the objective and subjective, the global and the individual. There is such a scope of knowledge between the covers of this book that you feel like a better and more knowledgeable person having read it. A mind-altering, life-altering book.' -- Dr Janina Ramirez

‘While the rest of us read words, Alice reads bones - and what stories they have to tell. In her hands they seem slick with life, bearing messages from ancient worlds. I was captivated.' -- Neil Oliver

'Another classic from Alice Roberts. She writes as a scholar with the intensity and flair of a novelist.' -- Dan Snow

‘Roberts is a prolific TV presenter, and
Ancestors skilfully deploys the arts of screen storytelling: narrative pace, a sense of mysteries being unfolded. […] [It] is above all a tribute to the archaeological profession.’ -- Dan Hitchens ― The Times

About the Author

Professor Alice Roberts is an academic, author and broadcaster, specialising in human anatomy, physiology, evolution, archaeology and history. In 2001, Alice made her television debut on Channel 4's Time Team, and went on to write and present The Incredible Human Journey, Origins of Us and Ice Age Giants on BBC2. She is also the presenter of the popular TV series Digging for Britain. Alice has been a Professor of Public Engagement with Science at the University of Birmingham since 2012.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B095BRN25G
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster UK
  • Accessibility ‏ : ‎ Learn more
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ 27 May 2021
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 9.9 MB
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1471188039
  • Page Flip ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Customer reviews:
    4.5 out of 5 stars 2,051 ratings

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Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
2,051 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find the book engaging and readable, providing amazing insight into human history and being particularly informative for those interested in archaeology. The writing style receives positive feedback, with one customer noting its wonderful clarity of language. While many customers consider it worth the money, some find the content disappointing.

80 customers mention ‘Readability’80 positive0 negative

Customers find the book engaging and delightful to read.

"This book is a gem...." Read more

"I really enjoyed the majority of this book...." Read more

"Ancestors well worth reading with a sophisticated intelligent engagement with the past, and how perceptions and ideas change through time and not to..." Read more

"...It's informative, instructive and most of all, interesting...." Read more

77 customers mention ‘Insight’70 positive7 negative

Customers find the book provides amazing insights into human history, with one customer noting it explains history in words that are easy to understand.

"...was it delivered promptly and packaged well, it is the most exciting thing on archaeology bar none-The author has a literary style that calmly tells..." Read more

"...Ancestors is a carefully thought out and well-expressed argument for a new way of doing prehistory -- trying to prevent the shape of present-day..." Read more

"...intelligent engagement with the past, and how perceptions and ideas change through time and not to just look through the cultural lens of the present..." Read more

"...It's informative, instructive and most of all, interesting...." Read more

53 customers mention ‘Writing style’53 positive0 negative

Customers find the writing style of the book engaging and readable, with one customer noting its wonderful clarity of language.

"...the most exciting thing on archaeology bar none-The author has a literary style that calmly tells you in no uncertain terms that archaeology is..." Read more

"...Ancestors is a carefully thought out and well-expressed argument for a new way of doing prehistory -- trying to prevent the shape of present-day..." Read more

"...All this is done in an engaging, witty fashion but one which leaves you in no doubt that Roberts is hugely knowledgeable in her own field of..." Read more

"...The content was accessible but more importantly, I was gripped by the way she challenged accepted ideas, inviting the reader to engage with a..." Read more

10 customers mention ‘Value for money’10 positive0 negative

Customers find the book informative and worth the money.

"...are described in detail, as is the history of their discovery, excavation and the theories around them...." Read more

"A very informative and thought provoking book...." Read more

"...Overall, interesting and worth a read if you are into Archaeology, Anthropology and human beliefs or coping mechanisms." Read more

"Well worth the money." Read more

8 customers mention ‘Content quality’0 positive8 negative

Customers find the content of the book disappointing.

"...shifted from technical analysis, to dialogue, to whimsy made it difficult to enjoy...." Read more

"...These I found tedious and not worthy of attention." Read more

"...Sadly the style is too casual and the content too light to interest me. I agree with some of the other reviews here, which say similar things...." Read more

"I am enjoying reading it but taking a long time. A map or maps would have been useful." Read more

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Top reviews from United Kingdom

  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 May 2025
    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
    This book is a gem. Not only was it delivered promptly and packaged well, it is the most exciting thing on archaeology bar none-The author has a literary style that calmly tells you in no uncertain terms that archaeology is changing with the growth of technology/genetics into an amazing threshold on the future .The discipline that is archaeology is fit for for the future, and for all who wish to partake.of amazing discoveries. Not only about artefacts and ancient lives, but about us all and where we might be heading. It has never been more relevant or more timely.
  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 18 December 2024
    Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
    I really enjoyed the majority of this book. Being into history already I flew through the chapters and was fascinated at what can be deduced from the different burials. Unfortunately a major fault I found was the 'woke' sensibilities of the author. Time and again she rightly says how we mustn't make assumptions about the past based on our modern beliefs and prejudices yet does just that herself. The talk of sex/ gender and 'third gender' took me right out of the book. It's the very definition of today's beliefs explaining the past's unanswerable questions. A pity she had to go on these non-scientific tangents but nonetheless I really enjoy the book.
    6 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 April 2022
    Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
    So many of the Amazon reviews describe Alice Roberts' book as woke or foolishly trendy in its attitude to gender, that I was put off buying it for several months. I was wrong. It is not woke or trendy. However, it is rather different from Alice's other books.

    On the surface, this is a book about a few selected burials in the area that is now the UK. The burials are described in detail, as is the history of their discovery, excavation and the theories around them. There are very few pictures in the book -- really just a few paintings by Alice Roberts herself. This is a good thing, because it means she has to paint word pictures of the burials, and her writing is beautiful.

    The thing that makes Ancestors different from Alice Roberts' older books is that she writes about the history of the discoveries and the ideas around them. This makes it quite a theoretical book, in that it addresses the ways that prehistory derived from archaeology gets it wrong. For example, one chapter revolves around the ways in which the presence of Stonehenge has distorted our theories about the surrounding landscape -- every settlement turns into "where the builders of Stonehenge lived"; even Mesolithic remains are evaluated in the context of their proximity to Stonehenge!

    This theoretical viewpoint means that Alice Roberts has to address the ways that contemporary roles in society have been projected backwards onto archaeological remains. In the 20th Century, society was largely defined by a division into male and female, and property ownership was the key to social class. Archaeologists opened a tomb, found items they thought of as gendered (jewellery/mirrors versus weapons/chariots) and assigned gender to the human remains on that basis. Then they would evaluate graves according to grave goods and assign social class. They ended up recreating prehistoric societies which mirrored their own, largely down to circular arguments.

    Alice Roberts argues in Ancestors that we need to consciously set aside our own bias and try to evaluate archaeological remains on their own terms. She is certainly not recommending that we try to fit those remains into 21st century gender categories, but uses that as an example to show how 19th and 20th century ideas of gender and class have affected archaeological theories from those times.

    (As an aside, not in her book, I note that social gender categories often follow linguistic gender categories. Linguistic gender is the way that words are tied together by categorising the things they represent, thus nouns are tied to pronouns by gender, and both are tied to adjectives in many European languages. The language of the Beaker People was a variant of Proto-Indo-European, which had two linguistic genders -- animate and inanimate. Perhaps the important divide for the Beaker people was into animate/singular and neuter/collective, rather than owned wealth or male/female?)

    Those reviewers who class Alice Roberts' book as 'woke' have misunderstood it. Ancestors is a carefully thought out and well-expressed argument for a new way of doing prehistory -- trying to prevent the shape of present-day society from dictating how we understand the past.
    62 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 October 2022
    Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
    Ancestors well worth reading with a sophisticated intelligent engagement with the past, and how perceptions and ideas change through time and not to just look through the cultural lens of the present. I prefer Alice Roberts written works and books on the whole. Archeology and science working together to elucidate history and separate it from superstition and belief. Which seems to have brought Alice Roberts under attack in the reviews on here and more widely from archeologists that just had their pet theories implode and of course the religious, many of whom might use science and technology but hate it when it makes them wrong. Obvious books to read if you enjoyed this, would be Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich. Life on the Edge by Jim Al-Khalili though there are many others I could recommend as well. One thing that did surprise me that Alice Roberts did not mention particularly when talking about women warriors and even gender fluidity was the Scythians as she does mention the Yamnaya culture "“Yamnaya (from the Russian for pits: yama) and has long been recognised to have connections with the Bell Beaker phenomenon in western Europe.”. As the Scythians also originating from the Pontic Steppe and known as a later but connected culture to the Yamnaya is well documented with having female warriors by Ancient Greek historians and through archaeology burials and ancient DNA. And Scythians being horse-riding nomadic people using horse with carts (chariots) often suspected of inspiring the Greek myths about the Amazons and Centaurs or their earlier precursors did. And as for Amazon why are all the reviews that are showing on the book page negative about this book and Alice Roberts ? Not one 5 star review on the books page you have to click on 5 star reviews. Good to see Amazon have changed the reviews on the book page to positive ones rather than all negative. As that was highly suspect for various reasons, including the are supposed to be selling the book. I said there are so many other books I could recommend well here are a few more. 1177BC The Year Civilisation Collapsed by Eric H. Cline. The Scythians by Barry Cunliffe. And the best overview history of the classical world The Classic World The Epic History of Greece and Rome by Robin Lane Fox. Incidentally Robin Lane Fox is related to Pitt-Rivers though a contemporary historian.
    16 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

  • Terence Fenton
    5.0 out of 5 stars exellent author
    Reviewed in France on 21 July 2021
    Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
    well laid out
  • Cliente Kindle
    5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book 👍
    Reviewed in Brazil on 17 December 2023
    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
    Great Book
  • Lori T
    4.0 out of 5 stars Very Informative
    Reviewed in Canada on 20 May 2025
    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
    This book was very informative. I learned a lot by reading it. Dr. Roberts shares her extensive knowledge of archaeological burial sites and explains things in a way that is engaging and easy to understand. If you enjoy reading history and about the people who lived centuries ago in Britain, you will appreciate this book.
  • Dr David P Thomas
    5.0 out of 5 stars Very accessible stroll through British prehistory.
    Reviewed in Australia on 28 June 2022
    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
    Professor Roberts writes in a very accessible style to bring the reader right up to date with current research directions on British prehistory. This is a subject about which she has been involved as broadcaster and author for many years and about which she is both authoritive and a great communicator.
  • linda s
    5.0 out of 5 stars ANCESTORS....A REVIEW.
    Reviewed in the United States on 31 March 2023
    Although this isn't my usual reading material, I really enjoyed this book. Her style of writing paints a good picture of what she saw and what it meant. To my surprise, I found the subject of prehistoric burials to be fascinating.

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