The Natural History Museum’s own FAQ on the project is notably careful. On skin pigmentation, it states that the forensic tool returned a result in “one of the two most highly-pigmented” of five categories, with the lightest categories ruled out. The FAQ does not give numerical confidence intervals and acknowledges that the predictive categories are defined labels rather than precise measurements of melanin content or spectroscopic skin color. Eye color is not explicitly addressed in the FAQ.
The 2019 peer-reviewed paper by Brace, Diekmann, Booth, and colleagues — published in Nature Ecology and Evolution and incorporating the Cheddar Man genome along with other Mesolithic samples — describes the pigmentation prediction slightly differently from some earlier news reporting. It notes that the analysis “suggests he most probably had blue or green eyes, dark brown (possibly black) hair, and dark or dark-to-black skin.” The addition of “possibly black” for hair and the “blue or green” formulation for eyes reflects the probabilistic nature of these predictions.
None of this means the findings are wrong or that they should be dismissed. The Western Hunter-Gatherer population to which Cheddar Man belonged was already known, from earlier ancient DNA studies of Mesolithic individuals from Spain, Luxembourg, and Hungary, to have been associated with dark skin pigmentation. Cheddar Man’s genetic placement within that population, combined with the direct pigmentation analysis of his own genome, points consistently toward darker skin. The finding is scientifically coherent and well-supported by convergent lines of evidence.
What it is not is a precise color chart. “Dark to black” describes a predicted category, not a specific skin tone that could be reliably matched to a paint swatch or a photograph. The exact shade — whether Cheddar Man’s complexion was more similar to one dark-skinned modern population than another, whether his skin darkened significantly with sun exposure, whether there were other modifying variants in his genome that might have pushed the result somewhat lighter or darker — is not resolvable from the current analysis.