The contrast with some other parts of Mesolithic Europe is instructive. Hunter-gatherers from further north and east — particularly from Scandinavia and the area that is now Ukraine and Russia — show higher frequencies of lighter-skin genetic variants than their western European counterparts. This suggests that there was already geographic variation in pigmentation within Mesolithic European populations, with lighter-skin variants more common in the north and east than in the west. The lightening of skin in northwestern European populations as we see it today appears to have involved the spread of these northern/eastern variants westward, through the demographic mixing that accompanied the Neolithic and Bronze Age transitions.
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## The Neolithic Transition: How Britain Changed After Cheddar Man
To fully appreciate what Cheddar Man represents, it helps to understand what happened to his population — and to Britain more broadly — in the millennia after his death.
The Neolithic period in Britain, which began around 4000 BCE, brought sweeping changes that were not merely cultural or technological but deeply biological. The incoming Neolithic farmers who introduced agriculture to Britain were not the same people as the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers they largely replaced. Ancient DNA studies, including the 2019 Brace et al. paper that incorporated the Cheddar Man genome, have documented this transition in detail.
The Neolithic farmers who came to Britain around 6,000 years ago descended primarily from populations that had originated in the Aegean region — western Anatolia and the Greek islands — and had spread through Europe following the development and spread of agriculture in the Middle East. Their genetic profile was distinct from the Western Hunter-Gatherers: they had different ancestry proportions, different allele frequencies, and different characteristic pigmentation-related variants.