In 1903, a complete skeleton was found in Gough’s Cave, near the English town of Cheddar. The oldest complete skeleton ever discovered in Great Britain, the discovery came to be known as Cheddar Man (because of its location, not because it was some kind of cheese-covered skeleton, which sounds amazing). Tests revealed that Cheddar Man was the bones of a twentysomething man who lived in Britain about 10,000 years ago, and experts believed that he had pale skin and light hair—pretty much the stereotypical image of a modern-day “British person.” Cheddar Man is a relic of the earliest days of the continuous habitation of the British Isles.
However, the scientists have done more testing, and they’ve thrown out the previous results. DNA analysis reveals that Cheddar Man actually had dark brown skin, blue eyes, and dark curly hair. This means that most if not all of the first modern Britons also had dark skin. A sizable percentage of today’s light-skinned British people, about 10 percent, are descended from Cheddar Man and his brethren.
“It really shows up that these imaginary racial categories that we have are really very modern constructions, or very recent constructions, that really are not applicable to the past at all,” said National History Museum archaeologist Tom Booth, one of the researchers who studied Cheddar Man’s bones. (The project also used new and existing information to create a forensic reconstruction of Cheddar Man’s whole head.)
After obtaining DNA samples from the skull, tests not dissimilar to those ones people are spitting into to find out their cultural heritage, show that Cheddar Man’s ancestors left Africa, settled in the Middle East, and eventually headed to far-western Europe.