The world Cheddar Man inhabited was profoundly different from Britain today in almost every physical and ecological dimension. The most significant structural difference was geography. Around 10,000 years ago, Britain was not yet an island. What is now the North Sea and the English Channel were substantially different — lower sea levels during and after the ice age had exposed a vast area of land connecting Britain to continental Europe. This landmass, called Doggerland by geologists and archaeologists, stretched from what is now eastern England to what is now the Netherlands and Denmark, and it was habitable land: river valleys, wetlands, forests, and coastal areas that would have supported substantial human populations and the animal communities they depended on.
The separation of Britain from continental Europe — the process by which rising sea levels gradually submerged Doggerland — was ongoing during Cheddar Man’s lifetime, though the final flooding of the last land connections would not be complete for a few thousand more years. Cheddar Man lived in a Britain that was connected to a larger landmass, part of a continuous north-European ecosystem rather than an island.
The climate of Britain around 10,000 years ago was warming rapidly from the depths of the last ice age but was not yet as warm as today. Forests were expanding northward as temperatures rose — birch and hazel woodland spreading across land that had previously been open tundra or grassland. Animals that would later disappear from Britain were still present: aurochs, the massive wild cattle from which domestic cattle are descended; wild boar; red and roe deer; wolves; bears; beavers. The rivers ran through landscapes that had been shaped by glaciation and were still adjusting to the warmer, wetter conditions of the early Holocene.