The headline caught the world’s attention. The deeper story — what the science actually showed, how it showed it, what it could and couldn’t tell us, and what it revealed about a period of British prehistory that most people know almost nothing about — is considerably more nuanced and considerably more interesting.
—
## The Gorge and the Cave: Where He Was Found
Cheddar Gorge cuts through the Mendip Hills in Somerset, in the southwest of England, a limestone ravine worn by water and time into one of the more dramatic geological features in the British Isles. The gorge walls reach heights of more than 100 meters in places. Running through them, hidden from view until you know where to look, is a network of caves that have been used by humans for tens of thousands of years.
Gough’s Cave is the largest of the roughly 100 caves in the gorge system. Named for a nineteenth-century entrepreneur who developed it as a tourist attraction, it runs about 100 meters into the limestone hillside. Its interior maintains a cool, relatively stable temperature year-round — conditions that, as later scientific analysis would confirm, are unusually favorable for the preservation of organic material, including ancient DNA.
The cave had been drawing tourists since the 1870s, when the first commercial developments began. By the turn of the twentieth century it was a well-established attraction. And it was in that context — a commercial cave operation during the Edwardian era — that the discovery happened.
In 1903, workmen doing maintenance or improvement work inside Gough’s Cave encountered human skeletal remains. The bones lay approximately twenty meters inside the cave entrance, beneath a layer of stalagmite. They were not the first prehistoric remains to be found in the gorge — animal bones and earlier human material had been turning up for decades — but they were unusual in their completeness. What the workmen had found was a nearly intact human skeleton.