Alice Roberts

I love prehistory - particularly the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. These were times when our ancestors made a revolutionary change from being hunter-gatherers to being farmers, and when great migrations of people spread languages - and genes - across Europe.

I’ve seen many dinosaur fossils, some mounted in museums, others in the process of being extracted from their rocky matrix, and it has never occurred to me that any could be anything other than genuine."

The history of palaeontology is littered with examples of famous frauds and fakes, often with eminent researchers in the field being thoroughly hoodwinked by some fairly shoddy fabrications.

My mum was an art teacher, so we used to have fantastic dressing-up costumes when we were little.

One way I try to manage it is by not having a princess party for my daughter and trying to do things that are not so stereotyped. But if she’s invited to a princess party, of course I’m not going to stop her going."

When I was in my 20s, and even though I was studying medicine, I didn’t ever really think that my body would fail. Now I’m in my 40s, I have to face a different reality - I, like everyone else, am slowly falling apart."

And when you take something like the changing colour of autumn leaves and start to ask why, you’re starting off on an intellectual journey which will take you beyond that moment of visual satisfaction, while robbing nothing from that experience."

I love Christmas. At this very special time of year, when the sun appears only fleetingly to those of us living in the northern hemisphere, I feel a deep connection with ancient ancestors.

I gave up meat when I was 18, and it was an ethical decision. I loved the taste, and went on holiday to Greece, fairly gorging myself on lamb souvlaki before taking the plunge into a meatless existence.

It’s tempting to look back into history with rose-tinted glasses. Most people in the Stone Age didn't live anywhere near as long as we're living now. Today we can enjoy a more wide-ranging diet and we have fruit and vegetables available all year round.

Just as your own existence is unlikely and far from inevitable, the evolution of modern humans as a species depended on a whole string of chance events - some happening in the environments our ancestors inhabited, and some inside their own bodies, including random mutations in their DNA.

Around 4000BC, the Mesolithic, hunter-gatherer way of life here gave way to a more settled, farming existence. Those Neolithic people built wooden trackways across the salt marshes and reed beds.