Earlier this year, on 5 March, I met up with a crew I knew very well - we'd filmed before on Incredible Human Journey - in Heathrow's Terminal Five.

We flew to Entebbe in Uganda, then drove some six hours to Kibale - the famous wild chimpanzee research station.

We arrived at the research station at dusk.

We were given a very serious health and safety induction which included: how to behave if a chimpanzee charged at you (stand up tall and wave your arms); how to behave if a forest elephant headed straight for you (stand aside); how to deal with army ants (don't stand on them).

The next day, we set off around 7am, walking into the forest, up a dirt track at first.

We were led by field guide Francis, who had worked at Kibale for 19 years.

On our team, assistant producer Mags Lightbody had been there in those early years, helping to habituate the chimpanzees to human presence.

Dr Alice Roberts holds a chimpanzee at the Uganda Wildlife Education Center. Strict rules in the National Parks mean that no one ever touches a wild chimpanzee in Kibale.

Five field assistants came with us to help carry all our gear into the forest. We turned off the track, down a steep and narrow path.

The forest was dense but the paths were well-used - by animals but also researchers.

Still, there was some pushing through undergrowth and our porters carried machetes to clear awkward or dangerous branches.

The forest was wet and getting steadily warmer as the sun climbed higher above us.

I was getting steadily warmer as well, as we trekked up and down through a series of thickly forested ridges and valleys.

At the bottom of the valleys, we would find ourselves splashing through small streams, or almost getting mired in boggy patches, which had been made even boggier by elephants, their massive, round footprints forming deep puddles.

Climbing a steep slope, Francis paused and whooped loudly, and I heard an answering whoop not too far away.

He was calling to the field assistants who were already out in the forest, with the chimpanzees.

We were very close, and in fact, when he pointed to the top of a tall fig tree just over the crest of the hill, I could see movement amongst the leaves.

Leaving the porters and the bulk of our gear behind, we carried on, as a smaller team, and came across the four field assistants and postgraduate students, all armed with notebooks.

Six or seven chimpanzees were high in the tree, eating a breakfast of figs.

They lay in the crooks of forked branches, reaching out to pick the fruit, and occasionally moving to a new branch, with a rustle and a small shower of falling leaves.

After about half an hour, they started to come down from the tree, and then they were off, knuckle-walking at a fast pace through the forest, and we followed them at a discrete distance.

They didn't stay move as a group. They came down out of the tree singly, although little ones stayed close to their mothers, jumping onto their backs for a lift once on the ground.

They kept in touch with each other with occasional grunts and pant-hoots as they dispersed in the forest, but they also seemed to know where they were headed.

Francis said the fig tree was a favorite place to start the day, but they'd stop off at other trees throughout the day.

They liked eating fruit in the morning, and ate leaves on the ground in the afternoon.

There were about 1800 chimpanzees in the whole forest; the group we were tracking comprised around 50 chimps, but this was also broken up into smaller groups of 15 to 20.

And all the time, groups would be splitting and fusing, with individuals moving between groups - chimpanzee society is very dynamic.

As the chimpanzees moved between trees, they were all around us in the forest, and would often pass by very close, sometimes a metre or two away - which was both terrifying and exciting.

Francis was very aware of where the chimpanzees were around us and would warn us - "There's someone over there," he would say.

The Kibale chimpanzees aren't hunted for bushmeat, and they're never fed by the researchers in the forest, so these chimpanzees viewed humans neither as a threat nor as a source of food.

Getting so close to the chimpanzees whilst they effectively ignored us was a huge privilege.

They were behaving naturally, just getting on with chimpanzee things, whilst we watched them.

Observing chimpanzees in this way is valuable and fascinating in its own right, but it also helps us understand ourselves.

We start to see where the real similarities and differences lie, we can identify the things about humans that are truly unique, when we compare ourselves with our ape cousins - with whom we have a common ancestor, going back some six to seven million years ago.

We had a good day's filming; cameraman Paul Jenkins was delighted that he'd been able to capture so much footage of the chimpanzees.

So, while it was still light, we started to head back to the research station.

We may only have been about a mile away from the compound, as the crow flies, but it took about an hour and a half to get in and out of the forest.

We were all happily tired at the end of the day, and settled down for a well-earned beer and a hot supper.

Going to bed early, I made sure that my mosquito net was safely tucked in under the mattress, and listened to the sounds of the forest again as I dropped off.

We'd be back in the forest again in the morning.

Dr Alice Roberts is the presenter of Origins Of Us.

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

Rather than just presenting history as a series of accepted facts we're seeing how the interpretation develops, during excavations and careful analysis in the lab.

Excavations we've been following in the series that have also hit the news include the discovery of the massive hoard of Roman coins in Frome, and the bizarre and chilling evidence of infanticide from the Yewden Roman villa site in Buckinghamshire.

Both these discoveries are featured in detail in episode one, Romans. The Yewden Roman Villa site was excavated ages ago - in 1912 - but archaeologist Jill Eyers has been taking a fresh look at the finds from that dig.

She knew there had been numerous infant burials around the site - 97 in total. In fact, infant 'burial' sounds a bit too respectful for what had actually been found - the remains of infants shoved unceremoniously into pits in the ground.

When Jill found the infant bones themselves in the museum stores, she sent them to Simon Mays, human osteologist at English Heritage.

He ascertained that all the infants had died around the time of birth - and suddenly the burials seemed even more suspicious.

Ninety seven infants all dying at birth: death from natural causes was now extremely unlikely.

When I looked at the bones, I also spotted what looked like cut-marks on one of them - the infant's body may have been dismembered. A horrible thought. It's very sad to think about those 97 little babies who never got the chance to grow up.

And so it does look like those babies were put to death. We know the Romans practised infanticide, but this was baby-killing on a massive scale.

Jill thought the villa may have been a brothel. It's an interesting hypothesis, and one which may stand the test of further investigations as Jill continues to explore the mystery of Yewden Villa.

As a new mum myself, I felt the sadness around Yewden particularly intensely. I'm so used to looking at human remains but these little skeletons were so much more than just objects: they were telling us a dark secret from the past, and they were all that was left of those tiny human lives that were extinguished so brutally.

Were they unloved and unnamed when they were placed in the ground? Or - perhaps even worse - had they been eagerly awaited by their mothers but born into a society that thwarted that natural love and protective urge? What had those mothers gone through?

I'm not an archaeologist myself, but I'm certainly allied to the field in a number of ways. I'm an anatomist and an osteoarchaeologist, or human bone expert, and I've specialised in looking at disease in old bones.

I've had a strange career path, I suppose, but I've enjoyed every minute of it. Starting as a medical doctor, I branched off to teach clinical anatomy and study old bones, and ending up working in television and writing books. I still teach anatomy and look at the odd skeleton, though.

My favourite moment from the series was being able to look at the skeletons from the Mary Rose, which features in the Tudor programme, the final episode.

I clearly remember watching the ship being raised on Blue Peter. And more recently, I had wanted to look at the skeletons for my PhD, which was about problems around the shoulder joint (I suspected the Mary Rose archers might have suffered from something called rotator cuff disease - which afflicts a lot of us in old age, but also affects athletes like cricket bowlers and baseball pitchers in their youth), but I had to stop somewhere.

So this was a really special opportunity for me to check the shoulders of a couple of the individuals from the ill-fated ship.

You'll have to watch the series to see what I found, but now I want to look at all of them. This was one of the great things about doing this series. I was making a television programme but also getting to indulge my own curiosity - meeting fascinating people, seeing interesting sites, and being able to examine ancient artefacts and bones.

Dr Alice Roberts is the presenter of Digging For Britain.

Digging For Britain is on Thursdays at 9pm on BBC Two and at different times on BBC HD. You can watch the first episode on the BBC iPlayer.

For more information on Roman history, please visit the BBC History site.