The big picture that ancient DNA had established by 2018 included several major findings that contextualized the Cheddar Man results. First, that Neanderthals and modern humans had interbred before Neanderthals’ extinction, and that most people living outside sub-Saharan Africa today carry a small percentage of Neanderthal ancestry in their genomes. Second, that modern human populations in Europe are the product of multiple large-scale migrations, not the gradual in-place development of a single population from Palaeolithic ancestors. Third, that the demographic history of Europe was punctuated by events of near-complete population replacement — the Neolithic transition and the Bronze Age steppe migrations — that were far more dramatic than models based purely on archaeological evidence had suggested.
The Cheddar Man study fit into this larger picture as a British data point that confirmed the Western Hunter-Gatherer population’s reach and characteristics, provided information about pigmentation in that population that was consistent with findings from elsewhere in Europe, and contributed to the growing dataset of ancient British genomes that the 2019 Brace et al. paper would use to characterize the Neolithic transition in more detail.
Professor David Reich of Harvard University, whose laboratory has been a major center of ancient DNA research and who co-authored many of the landmark papers in the field (though not the Cheddar Man study specifically), has described the revolution in prehistory driven by ancient DNA as comparable in significance to the Copernican revolution in astronomy: a wholesale revision of the framework through which we understand human history, enabled by a new category of evidence that simply did not previously exist.