Tom Booth, one of the Natural History Museum researchers involved in the Cheddar Man study, noted that this assumption — that humans quickly developed paler skin after entering Europe — was now in question. If the Western Hunter-Gatherers who arrived in Europe around 14,000 years ago and persisted there for thousands of years still had relatively dark skin, as the ancient DNA evidence suggests, then the transition to lighter skin was much more recent than previously assumed. The lighter-skin genetic variants now common in northwestern European populations seem to have spread primarily through two later waves of migration: first with Neolithic farmers from western Anatolia and the Aegean, and then with Bronze Age pastoralists from the Pontic steppe. Ongoing selection likely continued to push the trait after those migrations.
This means that for most of the period when modern humans occupied Britain — through the entire Mesolithic, and for a substantial period into the Neolithic — the population would have looked significantly different from the modern imagination of “ancient Britons.” The people who built the earliest stone structures in Britain, who hunted red deer and gathered hazelnuts in the forests of post-glacial England, who navigated the rivers and coasts of a landscape still recovering from the Ice Age, would have had a pigmentation profile more like the Cheddar Man reconstruction than like the fair-skinned, light-haired images of ancient Britons that populated older textbooks and museum exhibits.
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## The Mesolithic World Cheddar Man Inhabited
To understand Cheddar Man not as a genetic data point but as a person who lived in a specific time and place, it helps to understand what Britain looked like around 10,000 years ago.