In Luke, shepherds go to find Jesus. In Matthew, an unspecified number of wise men, sometimes portrayed as kings, arrive. Nativity plays usually throw all the elements together, with kings and shepherds beating a path to the stable.

Pagan Romans started their midwinter celebrations with the feast of Saturnalia on 17 December, ending them with a new year festival, the Kalendae Januariae, at the start of January - both were celebrated with parties and the exchange of gifts.

Stonehenge is famously aligned with midsummer sunrise, and possibly also intentionally with midwinter sunset.

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.

Science offers us the possibility of understanding natural rhythms and events that must have seemed like the work of angry and unpredictable gods to our ancestors.

While planting woodlands along rivers has been shown to work in small areas, it has been unclear whether it would be effective on a larger scale. But computer modelling indicates that restoring forests on floodplains could slow floodwaters and reduce the height of the flood downstream.

Always attempting to tame and subjugate nature is not the solution. But the latest science is helping us to map out a path across this shifting landscape in uncertain times, showing us how to work with natural forces, not against them.

In our evolutionary narratives, the organism itself often seems to play a passive role: a powerless victim, almost, of changes to its environment or mutations in its genes.

If a group of humans began to run regularly, perhaps allowing them to hunt or scavenge more effectively, anatomical changes would follow, especially among the still-developing youngsters.

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.

I was a fairly strict vegetarian - I ate eggs and dairy products but nothing that would involve killing an animal to furnish the food on my plate.

Eighteen years later, pregnant with my first child, I started eating fish. Oily fish in particular contains plenty of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, essential for neural development.

Later, I found it too hard to give up, and so I’ve continued eating fish and other seafood, while trying to ensure it’s sustainably sourced. This means I’m now one of those vegetarians I used to frown at - one who occasionally eats fish.

The colour of a British wood in autumn is predominantly yellow. There are relatively few European trees which have red leaves in the autumn. But there are splashes of crimson or rust-red colours from a few indigenous trees, like the rowan, as well as from introduced species, like the North American red oak.

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.

Evolutionary biologists have long pondered the phenomenon of the changing colours of autumn leaves. It’s possible that the red pigments are manufactured in the leaf as a side-effect of something else that’s happening at this time.

Autumn is much redder in North America and east Asia than it is in northern Europe, and this can’t be explained by temperature differences alone. These areas also have a greater proportion of ancient tree lineages surviving: trees have gone extinct at a higher rate in Europe compared with those other areas.

We’re not the only mammals who are partial to blackberries, far from it. Foxes and badgers will also gobble them up, helping to distribute the seeds, which survive the transit through the gut.

As well as tasting fantastic, blackberries are good for you. Anthocyanin isn’t just a pigment, it’s a flavonoid, a heroic antioxidant! The stuff of superfoods!

It seems that humans have been enjoying the taste and health benefits of blackberries for thousands of years. Gathered blackberries have been found at Neolithic sites, while a preserved iron age bog body, known as Haraldskaer Woman, provides definite evidence of blackberry ingestion.

Looking in detail at human anatomy, I’m always left with two practically irreconcilable thoughts: our bodies are wonderful, intricate masterpieces; and then - they are cobbled-together, rag-bag, sometimes clunking machines.

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.

Easter is an ancient festival of rebirth, but it’s also an excellent excuse for eating eggs. I really like eggs, of both the chocolate and chicken variety. But the chocolate ones, you must admit, can sustain only a fleeting interest. A sweet, sugary hit - and then it’s gone.

Embryology reveals surprising similarities between early embryos of seemingly quite different animals. And it also shows that some structures that may look very different later on have fundamental similarities in the way they form.

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.

I consider myself to be a relatively sceptical person. I like to see evidence for myself, and try to avoid speculating beyond available evidence. But I also have to accept some things on trust.

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.

I know a bit about vertebrate anatomy and I’d like to think that I’d spot if a skeleton was entirely fabricated or cobbled together from existing bits and pieces.

Chance is hugely significant in biology. In fact, the presence of apparent randomness in so many aspects of biology - from mutations in DNA to the chance involved in that one sperm reaching that one egg that became you - suggests that randomness is useful, even necessary, in very many cases.

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.

Spiders are always big in the autumn: they’ve had all summer to grow.

Whatever happens to science in schools, there's something peculiar going on if students don't see it as creative.

When everything kind of hit the fan, my dad married Jo Anne, and suddenly there were five kids from the Ripleys and five kids from the Doughertys. Then my dad and Joanne had a baby. I usually have to make a diagram.

I'm kind of a double middle child.

Now, I come from a long line of narcissists. And I also have no kids - by choice - but I understand not being a mother and the pain that comes from that.

I'm drawn to raw material and raw emotions.

Uzo Aduba over at 'Godspell' is doing an even more entertaining Donald Trump than Donald Trump's Donald Trump.

I have a soft spot for vintage movie houses covered in goo; what can I say?

Nothing is hanging on my walls.

All day I wait for my job, which I do at night, and once I get there, I walk a tightrope, jump through hoops, and take breathtaking dives.

I was always a big fan of 'Pippin' and 'Godspell,' even before I heard 'Meadowlark.'

Oh my God, I love Max von Essen.

I love D.C. I love working there.

Writing is the place where I can do it all and get away with it. You can't do that in the theatre.

The road's a tough life, but I said 'yes,' because as a kid growing up in Ohio, I never had a chance to see a Tony-winning actress in a role she won the Tony for.

George Hearn taught me that you learn that there are roles that are Tony roles and roles that are not.

My mother is always the most vulnerable person in any room, and so I definitely have that part of her inside me.

I'm like a prize fighter. When I'm not on stage, every action that I take has to be focused on my next performance.

I'm a strong follower of hydrotherapy.

'Next to Normal' has challenged me as an actor because of how complex Diana is. And that's got me hungry for another character like that in a non-singing role because it would be interesting to express that same intensity in a different way.