—
## What Western Hunter-Gatherers Looked Like Across Europe
The population group to which Cheddar Man’s genetics assigned him — Western Hunter-Gatherers — was not identified solely through the Cheddar Man study. By the time the 2018 announcement was made, the Western Hunter-Gatherer genetic profile had been established from multiple ancient individuals across a wide geographic range, and some of those individuals had also been analyzed for pigmentation-related variants.
A Spanish fossil known from a site in northern Spain, analyzed and reported several years before the Cheddar Man study, attracted considerable attention for showing a similar combination of traits to what the Cheddar Man analysis would eventually find — dark skin combined with blue eyes, associated with a broadly similar Western Hunter-Gatherer ancestry. That finding established, several years before 2018, that the pigmentation profile seen in Cheddar Man was not idiosyncratic to British Mesolithic individuals but reflected a broader population pattern.
Loschbour Man, an approximately 8,000-year-old individual found in Luxembourg, is another Western Hunter-Gatherer whose genome has been sequenced. Like Cheddar Man, Loschbour Man falls within the Western Hunter-Gatherer cluster and shows genetic signatures associated with darker skin and lighter eyes than present-day western European averages.
What these findings collectively establish is a picture of Mesolithic Europe in which the lighter skin tones now characteristic of northwestern European populations were not yet the population norm. The Western Hunter-Gatherers, who occupied western and central Europe from sometime around 14,000 years ago through the Neolithic transition, carried genetic variants associated with darker skin pigmentation that have since become rare in the populations of the same geographic areas.