The skeleton had been sitting in a museum case for more than a century when scientists finally extracted its DNA. For all those decades, visitors to London’s Natural History Museum had passed by the reassembled bones of a man who died some ten millennia before any living person was born — a man who had hunted and foraged across a Britain still emerging from the last Ice Age, who had sheltered in limestone caves in the Somerset hills, and who had eventually ended up in Gough’s Cave under circumstances that no physical examination could fully explain.
Researchers named him Cheddar Man, for the gorge in which his remains were found. They estimated his age, analyzed his bones, put his skeleton on display. But the face people associated with him — the face on the reconstruction that accompanied the exhibit — was largely guesswork, built on early-twentieth-century assumptions about what ancient Europeans must have looked like.
In February 2018, that assumption was overturned by a small hole drilled into the base of his skull.
The genetic data extracted from that drilling suggested that this particular ancient Briton had skin that fell in the darkest categories on the forensic prediction scale — dark to dark-to-black — along with blue or blue-green eyes and dark, probably curly hair. The finding wasn’t an anomaly. It was consistent with what ancient DNA researchers had been finding across Mesolithic Europe: that the lighter skin tones associated with northwestern European populations today were a later development, arriving with waves of farmers and herders who moved into the continent thousands of years after people like Cheddar Man had already made it home.