To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Photograph: Christopher Jones/Alamy View image in fullscreen Bryn Celli Ddu, a Neolithic passage tomb on Anglesey. Perhaps it would have been much better if the sites remained in situ, undiscovered until the author appeared. But their positioning suggested they had been cast into the grave after the body had been laid in the wood-lined chamber.

The Amesbury Archer is preserved in Salisbury Museum and, according to Roberts, “our visits to museums, to gaze on such human remains, are a form of ancestor worship”. Every year we publish a selection of books and pamphlets that address the key issues facing activists and trade unionists.

Indeed the grave itself contained nearly a hundred items – including copper knives, gold objects, boars’ tusks and a shale ring – making it the most richly furnished grave from the period that had ever been discovered in Britain.

For the deep history/archaeology diver, there's nothing like experiencing the landscape to focus the mind's eye. The main topic is covered in sufficient for the armchair archaeologist and is accessible without descending into a dry, academic, study. Interesting as the content was, the fluidity with which (in places) she shifted from technical analysis, to dialogue, to whimsy made it difficult to enjoy.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. The native life, is far from the idyllic, pastoral picture archaeology and modern documentaries tend to paint. This is a detailed and richly imagined account of the deep history of the British landscape, which brings alive those “who have walked here before us”, and speaks powerfully of a sense of connectedness to place that is rooted in common humanity: “we are just the latest human beings to occupy this landscape”. Life was a state of existence with a disease, bad teeth, crippling, broken bones healed and unhealed (the Hunter of Amesbury had lost his knee cap and recovered with a horribly crippled leg), heavy burden bone scars. But in Ancestors, anthropologist, 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.

Although Roberts does draw on genomic evidence to show the migration of peoples in prehistory, what is so fascinating about this book is the way it weaves together scientific and cultural interpretation.Roberts is a prolific TV presenter, and Ancestors skilfully deploys the arts of screen storytelling: narrative pace, a sense of mysteries being unfolded. This is a good thing, because it means she has to paint word pictures of the burials, and her writing is beautiful. Alice has been a Professor of Public Engagement with Science at the University of Birmingham since 2012. It explores our interconnected global ancestry, and the human experience that binds us all together.

Together with two stone wrist guards, or bracers, they formed the largest collection of bronze age archery equipment ever found. As an aside, not in her book, I note that social gender categories often follow linguistic gender categories. Had she been able to infuse the whole of the text with this compelling style, I would have given the book five stars. They ended up recreating prehistoric societies which mirrored their own, largely down to circular arguments.

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. Ancestors' is focused on the evolution and methods up from the grave digging, treasure hunting, and carnival attraction-seeking roots. 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. Studies of DNA from other Beaker graves in Germany show ancestry from the Eurasian steppe and migration clearly played a major role in establishing Beaker culture. Unfortunately, the pandemic intervened, and the Crick Institute suspended work on everything apart from coronavirus testing.