Beth Shapiro

I want to show how people have changed this landscape over and over and over again and about the opportunities that we have to be able to become more creative controllers of this landscape.

So I thought, I'll get a degree in science because I know how to do broadcast journalism.

You know, the ignorance of somebody who thinks they're an expert in something.

I know how to do that.

So I'll just do this other thing.

And that's the history of it.

I just kind of got sucked into being the scientist.

I've written a couple of popular books, which is still me trying to reach back out.

I want to be a communicator, but I also want to be a scientist because it's so much fun.

Yeah.

How did I pick a field working in ancient DNA?

This is something I had no idea about.

I ended up not getting the scholarship that I wanted to get and not getting into the university that I wanted to get into.

but wandering around the halls of the university that I did get into, and I met this guy called Alan Cooper, who was one of the few people in the world at the time, this was the late 1990s, who'd set up the special kind of lab that you need to be able to extract DNA from bones.

So this DNA is in terrible condition, so we have to have a purpose-built clean room to make sure that we don't spit in something or drop an eyelash in something, because then your DNA, which is in great condition, will be the thing that we amplify.

So we had one of these labs and I thought, well, that's kind of cool because I was interested in geology.

I was interested in human history.

Maybe I can use this as a way of telling stories that haven't been told before or rewriting the stories that we keep telling.

This was a time where we were learning a lot about human history and human ancestry and there was a lot more to be learned.

And so I thought this would be cool, but I wasn't sure.