This is a good thing, because it means she has to paint word pictures of the burials, and her writing is beautiful.

At one point Roberts memorably describes excavating Beaker pottery, like that found in the grave of the Amesbury Archer.

Obvious books to read if you enjoyed this, would be Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. It requires imagination, as well as scientific expertise, to read the “stories written in stone, pottery, metal and bone”. Remains have disappeared, as it would happen after 2 world wars and before the invention of 'archaeology'.

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. 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.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. 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. 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.