None of this makes Cheddar Man less British, in any sense that word can meaningfully apply to someone who lived before Britain was a concept. He was one of the people who lived in the landscape that would eventually become Britain. He was fully human, fully capable, equipped with the same basic cognitive and social capacities as any person alive today. He navigated a world vastly different from the present — colder, wilder, emptier of people, rich with species now extinct or absent — with the knowledge and skills appropriate to that world.
The finding that he probably had dark skin was not, as Mark Thomas correctly observed, surprising to researchers who had been following the ancient DNA literature. But it was — and remains — significant to a broader public that had not understood how recently the lighter pigmentation of northwestern Europeans evolved, how dynamic and changeful the history of human populations in Britain has been, and how radically the assumptions embedded in older museum displays and cultural imagination have diverged from what the evidence shows.
The headline says “suggested.” That word is correct, and it matters. Science that overstates its conclusions eventually pays a credibility price that the field as a whole absorbs. The finding that Cheddar Man’s genome most probably predicted dark skin and blue or blue-green eyes is, properly stated, a genuinely extraordinary thing — extraordinary enough to be worth stating accurately rather than dramatically.
He lived in Britain ten thousand years ago. The limestone cave preserved his bones. The petrous bone preserved his DNA. The science extracted what it could from what was there. And what it found has changed, in a precise and documented way, what we know about who the first known inhabitants of Britain looked like.