I suppose the thing I’m quite pleased about is that I am, I would hope, a role model for girls and younger women who are thinking about doing science.

If we don’t concentrate on resurrecting science, we’re not going to be able to compete in a global economy.

More useful than beautiful perhaps, my favourite regular programme is 'Question Time'. And Charlie Brooker is just hilarious.

I love Roger Deakin's writing, and enjoyed making a programme about wild swimming for BBC4, inspired by his book about his own aquatic adventures, 'Waterlog'.

I usually turn over when ads appear on television. But - very rarely - I am gripped by a particularly beautiful one, and wonder if art historians of the future will point to these televisual delights as our best art.

The access to information the web provides is both daunting and exciting. Information that was once secreted away in library stacks is now so much more easily available.

Archaeology can be overlooked as a discipline, I think, but it’s incredibly important to have this other way of approaching the past - not just through historical documents, but through actual physical remains - objects, buildings and the layout of our towns.

It’s incredible that the layout of the centre of Chester, for instance, is still essentially that of the original Roman fort.

You don’t need to go to Rome, Prague or Vienna to find wonderful architecture, amazing stories and suprising, hidden gems.

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.

So I think as a biologist I would like us to focus on this planet and finding solutions to sustaining humanity, to improving people's lives globally, but doing our absolute utmost to preserve as much biodiversity as we can, knowing that we have already been responsible for the loss of thousands of species.

So I had this fascination with old bones and being able to diagnose disease in old bones. And I was doing that, and started to do bone reports for the Channel 4 series 'Time Team'.

Then the BBC approached me in 2005 and asked me to be one of the presenters of the series 'Coast', which turned into a very long-running series.

Biological anthropology tends to focus on skeletons because that's what is often left behind in the ground, but I am a whole-body anatomist, I'm a clinical anatomist and that's what I teach, I teach it all, not just the skeleton, the muscles and nerves, blood vessels.

The paleo diet is utter nonsense - it is such pseudoscience.

The environment would be better off and everyone would be healthier if we stopped eating meat.

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.

The science of being healthy is well-known. It is not esoteric. There are no magic bullets. If you want to live a long life, we’ve known the answers for more than a hundred years. It’s a wide-ranging diet with as much fruit and veg as you can stuff into yourself, and plenty of exercise. It doesn't even matter what kind of exercise.

I have family connections with Salisbury through my godmother. Her sister lived there, so I have very fond memories of visiting the city as a child.

You can somehow get access to what is perceived to be a better school by either being religious or appearing to be religious. That is unfair.

My childhood hero was David Attenborough. He opened my eyes to the wonder of the natural world. In fact, he’s still my hero. I interviewed him at the Science Museum in 2015, and he is such a thoughtful, humble and inspiring person.

The fate of the vast majority of species on this planet has been extinction, eventually.

We need to stop being so profligate with fossil fuels, to rein back climate change and protect biodiversity. We need to work together, globally, and I’m optimistic that we will.

There should be regulation that prevents all schools, not just state schools, from teaching creationism because it is indoctrination, it is planting ideas into children's heads. We should be teaching children to be much more open-minded.

People who believe in creationism say that by teaching evolution you are indoctrinating them with science, but I just don't agree with that.

Science is about questioning things.

I'm strict about taking nuts and dried fruit with me and, if I have access to milk, small packets of porridge to eat in a break.

Lunch on the road is usually the same as breakfast and tea in remote places - packet meals. I'm veggie and generally get vegetable curry or rigatoni.

After a few days of vegetable curry I crave my husband's home-made pizza.

When I asked what people would change about their bodies on Twitter, the birthing process was an extremely popular response!

The human knee is complex and prone to failure in a variety of ways; there’s a lot of muscle mass low down in the legs which makes moving them fairly inefficient.

Our long, flexible lumbar spines are great in many ways - they help us to run efficiently, for instance. But they have their drawbacks. The lumbar vertebrae are under great strain, and as we age, the ligaments that hold the pulpy centres of the intervertebral discs in place dry out.

Our ape legs make us great generalists - we can walk, run and climb. But when you try to do too many things at once, you can end up with problems.

From a very young age, parents are pushing their boys to achieve in a way they don’t always do for girls.

I don’t think anyone is saying that we should be treating boys and girls exactly the same and that we should try to eliminate all differences. What the psychologists who do this work are saying is we should be aware of it and careful about it, especially if we think it could be limiting choices.

The important thing is when you look at areas like physics and you realise that only one in five A-level students is a girl. We know it isn’t about aptitude.

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.

As an anthropologist, I believe strongly in our common humanity. We can rise above the tribal divisions that have caused so much anguish and real damage in the past.

I find humanism to be the most rational and positive philosophy for life. And it’s not a new thing at all - the history of humanist thought is deep and inspiring.

The real hallmarks of humanity are: curiosity and an amazing ability to cooperate.

When I started doing television, I was very aware my clothes would be obvious and it was a great opportunity to promote brands which are made with respect to people and the environment.

I was a goth in my student days. I dyed my hair black, but it came out grey, with a blue scalp. Then I dyed it red and it came out fuschia pink.

Look what consumer power has done with organic food; we can do the same with clothes.

Science plays a huge role in our lives. We're surrounded by technology, we depend on it.

Of course 'Horizon' had made an impact on me from a young age, but it was also humbling to meet and interview eminent scientists, and hear their high opinion of the series and of the science presented on the BBC more generally.

I’m a firm believer in teaching children to manage risk.

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

I’ve always loved the seaside and I used to be a fairly keen surfer, but it’s a solitary activity so when my husband and I had children, we bought sit-on-top kayaks. Whenever possible, we escape to the coast or explore rivers with them.

I’m slightly obsessed with Moomins. They were my specialist subject on BBC’s 'Celebrity Mastermind' a few years ago!

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.