None of this is an argument against the Cheddar Man pigmentation predictions. The result is well-supported by the genome data that was recoverable, consistent with predictions from other Mesolithic individuals from the same population, and transparently presented by most of the researchers involved as a probabilistic estimate rather than a fact about observed skin. What it means is that the prediction should be held with a degree of epistemic humility that not all popular coverage maintained.
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## The 1998 Reconstruction Versus the 2018 Reconstruction: A Before and After
The contrast between the two reconstructions of Cheddar Man — the one produced in 1998 by researchers at the University of Manchester, before the DNA analysis, and the one produced in 2018 by the Kennis brothers, using the genetic predictions — is one of the most vivid illustrations of how genetic data has changed what we thought we knew about ancient populations.
The 1998 reconstruction portrayed Cheddar Man as a man with relatively pale skin, lighter hair, and brown eyes. This was a face that would not have looked dramatically out of place among contemporary people of northern European heritage — a face that fit the implicit assumption that ancient British people would have resembled modern British people in most of their physical characteristics.
This assumption, it turned out, was historically backward. The paler skin associated with contemporary northern European populations is not an ancient constant but a relatively recent development — one that occurred primarily after the Neolithic, as new populations introduced new genetic variants, and as selection continued to shift the population average over thousands of years.