Dr Patrick Roberts is W2 Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany. He completed his PhD at Oxford University and has worked in tropical forests across the Amazon Basin, the lowlands of Sri Lanka, the Wet Tropics of Australia, and the island settings of Wallacea and wider Pacific. Recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including a European Research Council Starter Grant (?1.5 Million), he has written or co-authored over 60 peer-reviewed journal articles and his work has featured on the BBC, Channel 4 and in The Times, among others. He is the author of the academic book Tropical Forest Prehistory, History and Modernity (OUP, 2019) and this is his first for a trade audience.