The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Alice Roberts: How Archaeology is Answering Humanity's Biggest Questions

Episode Date: March 7, 2025

Archeologist and anthropologist, Dr. Alice Roberts talks to host Steve Paikin about how her work is trying to answer some of humanity's biggest questions through the lens of archeology and genetics. She's the author of "Crypt: Life, Death and Disease in the Middle Ages and Beyond," and the host of "Digging for Britain." She's in Canada to promote a new live show called "From Cell to Civilization." See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Renew your 2.0 TVO with more thought-provoking documentaries, insightful current affairs coverage, and fun programs and learning experiences for kids. Regular contributions from people like you help us make a difference in the lives of Ontarians of all ages. Visit tvo.me slash 2025 donate to renew your support or make a first-time donation and continue to discover your 2-point TVO. Viewers might know our next guest as the host of Digging for Britain, one of our most popular shows here on TVO. Alice Roberts is an archaeologist and anthropologist whose work tries to answer some of humanity's bigger questions through the lens of archaeology and genetics.

She's in Canada to promote a new live show called From Cell to Civilization. She's also the author of Crypt Life, Death and Disease in the Middle Ages and Beyond. It's just out in paperback now. And we're delighted to have Alice Roberts with us here in the studio today. Great to meet you. Hello Steve. It's just wonderful to have you here. It's lovely to be in Canada. Now I hope you can say that for a good long time.

We're having a tough week. Yeah, I know. I know. I hope so. Anyway, we just introduced you as an archaeologist and an anthropologist, but before that, some may not know, you were a doc. You worked for the NHS, right? Yeah, yeah, I did.

So, okay, maybe just a little background here. That's one heck of a virage from that to where you are now. How did that happen? It sounds like it, but actually I've always just been fascinated in the human body and I think that's what led me into studying medicine and becoming a doctor. And then I ended up moving away from clinical practice into academia. I became a university lecturer teaching anatomy, the study of the structure of the body.

Then my research was about looking at old bones and trying to detect disease in old bones. I'm still working as a doctor, it's just that my patients were alive a very long time ago. That's how I see it. These skeletons on the book cover, these are just deceased patients of yours. Yeah, that is how I think of them. So I'm fascinated with looking at skeletons trying to diagnose disease and I'm trying to understand patterns of disease and what life was like in the past.

It's been revolutionized because now we've got ancient DNA. So we can extract DNA from old bones and we can look at the DNA of those humans, so the actual human DNA, and we can learn a lot from that about family relationships, about people moving around, migration patterns, all of that kind of thing. But we can also get the DNA of pathogens. So we can look at the infectious agents that people had on board when they died.

And so we're able to track disease in the past in a way that we literally haven't been able to before. It's totally transformative. Amazing. Let's do an excerpt here from Crypt. Here we go. Sheldon, you want to bring this up and I'll read this out loud for those listening on podcast.

Archaeology, you're right, is not ancillary to history. It is not its slightly scruffier, grubbier handmaiden. It's unashamedly earthy, grounded, and physical. But out of the dirt come gems of understanding. Bringing together these two disciplines, history and archaeology, with all these new scientific techniques, we now have an extremely powerful way of interrogating and understanding the past. Okay, why is archaeology not the handmaiden of history, as you put it? I think it's really important because in the past there has been this tendency to take history

and by that I mean what we get from the written record. So you've got all this documentary evidence and then to use archaeology just to illustrate it. So to say, oh, well, we know that the Romans were in Britain from the first to the fifth centuries. So here's a nice villa that we can use to illustrate that. Or here's a Roman bathhouse that we can use to illustrate that. But archaeology is a source of evidence in its own right. So it's actually much more powerful if we look at the archaeology

and say, what can we say from that? Let's ignore the history. Let's put that to one side for a minute. We'll look at what the archaeology is telling us about the past and about society and how societies are changing, groups of people coming and going, all of that kind of thing. Then we'll put it back together with history and we'll actually use it to test the history. Because of course the history is biased. It's written by certain people with certain agendas and so the archaeology

is able to help us test it. The other thing of course that archaeology can do is go back before history. So we don't have much in Britain before the arrival of the Romans. You know we've got thousands and thousands of years of people living in Britain with nothing written down at all. And so for that vast period of time, archaeology is all we've got. But actually we can still tell quite a lot from the remains of the people themselves, as I describe in crypt, but also from the culture that they leave behind as well.

So all the objects they've made and the buildings they've created. So we can tell a lot just from those physical remains. And I love it because it's physical, because you can touch it and you're in touch with people in the past. Can I just understand a little more about what you said with history having a bias? What would be the... I mean Winston Churchill comes to mind, you know, the history of my life is going to be good because I'm gonna write it and I'll make sure of it. But we're going back thousands of years right now. So what kind of bias would they have had back then?

Well, even going back to the Romans, history is written by the victors. So when we look at Roman Britain, we're looking at it through the lens of the Romans, the literate Romans. And as time goes on, they're Romani Britons, but you're still looking at just the higher echelons in society, you're not learning anything from the vast majority of ordinary people, for instance.

So, again, archaeology gives us an opportunity to look at society much more broadly, not just the wealthy elite who are able to read and write. So, there's lots of different biases. The victors in a conquest are going to end up writing the history books. So they'll play things their way and archaeology allows us to deconstruct a bit of that. But it does, I mean really importantly, it does allow us to spread the net more widely and see what was happening right across society. Middle Ages, a period of incurable epidemics, sword fights, crusades, gruesome murders,

lots of s sort of things. What is it about all that you find so fascinating? Well, there's a lot of material, Steve. So, I mean, as you said, there's a lot of material. There's a lot to see in the skeletons. So there's a lot in terms of infectious diseases. We have all sorts of diseases ravaging medieval Europe from leprosy and syphilis to, of course, the plague.

And some of these diseases actually we can diagnose looking at the bones. So things like syphilis leave very distinctive marks on bones if somebody has syphilis for a long time. But there are some diseases that leave no marks on bones, which is a bit disappointing for me as somebody that looks at the physical remains of bones. But my geneticist friends are now able to take samples from those bones and say actually even though there's no trace on the skeleton, no observable trace on the skeleton of what this individual died from, we can detect a particular pathogen. And so we're seeing astonishing results now with the plague for instance.

So the plague was first characterized in the 19th century and that was from an outbreak in Hong Kong which then spread more widely. And it's caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis. So it was named after the man who first saw it down the microscope, Alexandre Yersin. And he looked at it down the microscope, identified it and that was the first identification of it. Later on, much later of course, we've got a genetic identification of it now. We can actually look at its DNA and say that is plague DNA. We've been able to go back to the 14th century for instance and look at mass graves from the 14th century

when the Black Death was tearing through Europe. We've got amazing historical literature telling us about how awful that pandemic was. It wiped out between a third and a half of the population of Europe. It was horrendous. But people have argued about which particular pathogen it was. You know, what is it? Is it a virus? Is it a bacterium? Could it be some kind of hemorrhagic fever? What exactly is it? The DNA gives us a diagnosis, a diagnostic tool.

So we can take samples from bones. We know now that that 14th century Black Death was the bubonic plague. We also know, going back to the 6th century, that a plague that spread through the Byzantine Empire in the reign of the Emperor Justinian is the same again. So it keeps coming back. And not only that, as I've said, archaeology can push back before we have any written records.

We've now got evidence of plague going right back into the Bronze Age and even the Neolithic. So we're talking about a bacterium that has been infecting us and causing outbreaks of disease for thousands of years. I presume, given what you do for a living, that you from time to time think about what it must have been like to live in that time and how you would handle it if you had lived at that time. Yeah. What do you come up with? Absolutely. I mean, I think that's one of the things, I mean, particularly writing this most recent book, Crypt, one

of the things you're confronted with is just the horror of living through those periods where you've got diseases like the Black Death, where you've got diseases like leprosy and syphilis which are absolutely rife as well. And these, back then, were incurable diseases. Once you start to have symptoms of that disease, you know that you're likely to die or that you're going to suffer some terrible consequences on the way actually with things like syphilis. You wonder how you would have survived it yourself had you lived at that time? Yeah, well as I said, between a third and a half of the population of Europe were wiped out.

And across England we have, in the fields across England, there are these phenomena which actually have their own little acronym DMVs, deserted medieval villages and they've disappeared underneath the fields and they're a kind of trace of that terrible depopulation that happened at the time. But of course it wasn't just pathogens, there's all these awful pathogens but at the same time people are being awful to each other as well. So, you know, there are plenty of battles, plenty of wars going on and also outbreaks of violence within populations and there's a really chilling chapter in the book which is about an episode during the reign of Ethelred II in the 11th century where he basically unleashes ethnic violence against Vikings. And there were Vikings who were attacking England at that time.

But we're close to Scandinavia in England. There were also Scandinavian people who had come and settled in England. And Ethelred said, go and find those Scandinavian people, weed them out and kill them. And we know that happened. And we've actually got archaeological evidence of what we think is victims of that St. Bryce's Day massacre in the 11th century. Archaeogenomics. That's a new term to me.

Want to tell us what that means? It's very new. It's very, very new. So we've been talking about ancient DNA for a while. So DNA is the code of life. It's in all our cells. It's how our cells know what to do. It's how they know what to develop into when we're embryos and growing.

And they're basically governing our bodies and what they do. So we can look at genomes today and we can learn things about genetics today by interrogating DNA, but we can go back to the past and we can look at old bones and we can actually take samples from old bones and get DNA from those. It's degraded so it comes out in small pieces so it's been an amazing couple of decades of work to get to where we are now where we can assemble a whole genome from these tiny little bits of DNA which you stack up until eventually you've got a whole genome.

And actually we've got ancient genomes now from thousands of years ago and even tens and even hundreds of thousands of years ago. So it's a new, it's almost like a new written record because it is like writing, it is a code, but it's a new source of information from the past that we haven't had before. And the reason I talk about archaeogenomics is that it's not just looking at little bits of DNA now, as we've been able to do for a while, perhaps just a little bit of DNA that we inherit from our mothers called mitochondrial DNA, or just looking at the Y chromosome DNA that men have.

What we can do now is look at entire genomes. We're in the era of archaeogenomics and it's starting to get really exciting because of that. It's starting to get exciting. Okay. Yeah, we're just at the beginning of something really quite profound, I think, in terms of the information we're going to learn. So to what extent is it helpful to understand things

that we're dealing with today, COVID, H5N1, I mean, make a long, long list, to know about these things from tens of thousands of years ago? Yeah, I think it's really helpful. And I think I've always felt that about paleopathology. So the study of disease in the past actually helps us to understand diseases in the present.

And particularly with infectious diseases, what it's doing is giving us epidemiology in the past. So it's allowing us to see how diseases have changed over time over a very long period and not just over the period where we've had these tools. So not just over the past few decades, for instance, but to be able to push it back centuries and centuries and centuries. And it's really important to be able to do that and look at look at for instance how if we take the plague as an example to look at how

the plague has changed over time because we're looking at evolution we're looking at a pathogen which is changing there are genetic changes in it over time and we can see how those genetic changes might make it more virulent, for instance. And then you have that seeding and outbreak. So it's really helpful, I think, for looking at how diseases spread in the here and now to be able to have that long view and to be able to track them in the past. Okay, get comfy because I'm going to do a bit of a set up here. You have written a lot of, I mean, I've looked at your,

what a body of work, holy smokes, you've been busy. You've been busy. Lot of popular science books, The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being, very popular. We mentioned Digging for Britain, very popular show on this channel. Your new live show, which is not like a lecture, right? This is really going to be, this is a bit of theater actually,

sell to civilization. We're gonna talk more about that in a second. What role do you think popular science can play in scientific literacy in an age of particular misinformation that we're living through right now? Oh my goodness, I think it's absolutely crucial. It is absolutely crucial, you hit a nail on the head. I think that we are being bombarded with information in a way that can feel quite overwhelming. And I think that information coming from trusted sources is more important than ever.

And at the same time as having all this misinformation, we're also in a bit of a golden age in terms of scientists being able to directly communicate with the public. It feels quite new. Obviously television has been around for a while and we've seen lots of scientists engaging through the medium of television which is a wonderful way of reaching out to people in their homes and talking to them and sharing information. But we've also got scientists out on social media, blogging, blogging, sharing that knowledge. And actually not just pushing knowledge out, but bringing knowledge in. Because it's really important for scientists to listen to people, to listen

to people's concerns, to listen to people's own expertise about their own lives, and to be able to bring that into their science. So I think it's important to be able to share, to disseminate information, but it's also really, really important to have a dialogue too. And as you say, now more than ever with all this misinformation and disinformation. Well, bingo, because how distressing is it to you that no matter how credentialed you are, and no matter how much work you've done and how on top of your research you are, and no matter how much work you've done, and how on top of your research you are, there are going to be millions of people out there who just because of what I just said,

aren't going to believe a thing you say. How problematic is that today? Do you know, I think I go round and round about this. During the height of the pandemic in 2020-2021, scientists, including myself, were quite worried about how much disinformation and misinformation there was. And in the UK, we were a bit worried about the levels of vaccine take-up, for instance,

because there'd been all this misinformation about the vaccines. But then actually, when it came to it, we had really good vaccine take-up. What was it? So, God, I don't know off the top of my head. We were 85 to 90 percent in Canada, which was not bad. Yeah, no, I think that's fantastic.

At the States it was 50 percent. And so I think we were probably equivalent in the UK to Canada. So there'd been this kind of nervousness about the vaccines and about the take-up of the vaccines, but actually when it came to it, it wasn't as bad as we thought it would be. I think there could have been better public engagement around vaccines. I think that when labs started to develop those new vaccines, we should have at the same time had really serious public engagement, where we've got scientists engaging in dialogue with the public,

talking to people about their concerns and their worries, because they're real, the concerns and worries are real. And we need to talk them through and find out what people are worried about and open that discussion early. Unfortunately, that discussion was left to the point where the rackets were ready to go. So I think we could have done better. There's lots of lessons to be learned and I think we could have done better. But I suppose what I'm trying to say is we can worry a lot about misinformation and disinformation.

We do have ways of fighting it, of combating it. And I think actually most people are really thoughtful about where they get their information from and who they're listening to. So that gives me a lot of hope. But also I think having scientists, we're at this point in, I suppose, human experience where science and technology are advancing really rapidly. And so we need to be able to share information about those advances with people so that we can decide, make ethical decisions about whether we want to have these advances. We don't have to have them if we don't want them.

So making ethical decisions, tooling people up with information so that they can make sensible decisions about themselves, about their own health, about society, about the kind of science policies that they'd like their governments to be putting in place. And so we think lifelong learning is really essential at the moment. It's not enough to stop learning about science at school. We need to make sure that people have access to science throughout their lives.

That's our motto here, never stop learning. That's the tagline. Well, Anthony Fauci wasn't bad at that for a while. But compare him to Charles Darwin. How well do you think Charles Darwin engaged audiences on this stuff? Do you know, Charles Darwin is a hero of mine and of course he is because I'm a biologist. And he came up with the mechanism of evolution. He didn't come up with the idea of evolution. He came up with how it happened. So by the time Darwin was writing On the Origin of Species, people could see that there was a wealth of evidence that evolution has happened. There were incredible fossil records showing that you could see creatures evolving over time.

So evolution was a given actually when Darwin was writing his amazing book. But what people hadn't been able to uncover was how it worked. So the full title of his book is really important because it's not just on the origin of species, it's on the origin of species by means of natural selection. So he said, here's the answer, or a big part of the answer anyway. So he came up with this incredible idea.

So he did Alfred Russel Wallace. They wrote a paper together, which was published in 1858. And this is hilarious because it was published by the Linnaean Society in London. And the roundup at the end of the year of the Linnaean Society said, nothing much happened this year. There weren't any big breakthroughs in biology. So they didn't realise. They had this amazing, ground-breaking insight into how evolution worked.

And the scientists themselves were going, we don't think that's that important. The following year Darwin published his book which laid out his thesis much more broadly but it wasn't just for the scientific community, it was a popular science book. So everyone was reading it and saying hang on we think he's done something here. At which point, of course, the scientist, he went, yeah, okay, we might have overlooked that. Maybe this actually was really important. Maybe it is the most important breakthrough that we've had in biology ever.

Yeah. Right on. Shall we show a clip of your work? Here is From Cell to Civilization. Sheldon, if you would, let's roll it. Join me, Professor Alice Roberts, live on stage across Canada. This is the story of us from cell to civilization.

Join me live to explore the fascinating connections between our past and our present and the thrilling journey of humankind. This is the story of us. How do you tell the story of the Earth in one night? It's, yeah, it's quite ambitious. You think? It's just, you know, four billion years in two hours.

But yeah, I've made programs and I've written books and I've given talks focusing on human evolution or looking at evolution more broadly, but I've never done something quite as ambitious as this. So going all the way from the origin of the earliest life on earth, the earliest cells, and then it's single-celled animals for a very long time. That's all we've got, single-celled microorganisms and then the evolution of multicellularity, so organisms which have a number of cells and then an explosion in the Cambrian period where we start to get all this incredible diversity different animals appearing. And then to keep going and keep going and keep going and look at the evolution of reptiles and then mammals and then when we get the evolution of primates and then apes and then

hominins. How many minutes into the show before we show up? And eventually humans. Yes. If I was doing it on a proper timeline, we'd only be there for the last minute of the show. But we're quite, I think I've allowed us to be a bit more parochial than that. So humans are most of the second half. Because it's fascinating looking at what makes us different.

We're animals and we're apes, but we're different. What is it that makes us different? What is it that's made us so successful as a species? So I look at that and I end up with the origin of some of the world's most beautiful, glorious ancient civilizations. So yeah, it's ambitious, but I think I've managed to do it. Oh, I have no doubt. Now you're coming back in May, I think, to Toronto, but are you going across Canada? Yeah, I'm going right across Canada. So I'm touring across Canada with this show. How much of the world are you going to get to see as well?

Well, I'm hoping to see a lot of Canada while I'm here, certainly, because I've been to bits of Canada before. I've been here filming with the BBC. I've never been to Toronto before. This isn't my first time in Toronto right now. No kidding. So I'm already out there on social media going, what do I need to go and see? I'm only here for two days, but what do I need to go and see?

So yeah, I'm really looking forward. It's such an amazing country. I mean, the diversity of landscapes that you've got here in Canada is absolutely stunning. It's big. You know, you could get into a car at the foot of Yonge Street. We're on Yonge Street right now in Toronto. But 15 minutes south of here is where Yonge Street starts at Lake Ontario. You could get into a car, you could drive for three days up Young Street

and not get to the end of the province of Ontario. This is a big, big place. That's amazing. You know, I'm doing a series of series for Channel 4 in the UK about travel and history and archeology and the landscape. And I'd love to do that in Canada. It would be fantastic.

I mean, I'm really interested in how history is situated in the landscape. I think we can look at history and take it away from geography but when we put it back together. So maybe I'll have to come and do that, maybe I'll have to come and make a travel and history show here. It's a marvelous idea. I can't wait to see your show. You're coming May 7th to Toronto and then people can consult their local listings for across the country. There's Crypt, there's From Cell to Civilization. Anyway, there's the TV show They're coming May 7th to Toronto and then people can consult their local listings for across the country. There's Crypt, there's From Cell to Civilization.

Anyway, there's the TV show we do here. You've got a lot going on, Alice Roberts, so we're glad you could spare some time to come and visit us here at TVO today. Lovely to see you, Steve, and lovely to chat. Thank you.