Aveline’s Hole, a cave near Burrington Combe in the Mendips, contains human skeletal remains that date to approximately the same broad period as Cheddar Man — the early post-glacial Mesolithic. The Aveline’s Hole remains represent the earliest known formal burial or deposition of human remains in Britain, suggesting that the region’s Mesolithic inhabitants had practices around the treatment of the dead that went beyond simple abandonment of remains.
This regional archaeological context is important for situating Cheddar Man not as a lone individual in an otherwise empty landscape but as one member of a human community that used the Somerset caves as part of a broader territorial and seasonal strategy. The precise nature of the relationships between individuals at different cave sites — whether Gough’s Cave and Aveline’s Hole and Wookey Hole were used by the same community, related communities, or unrelated groups — is not established, but their proximity and contemporaneity suggest a landscape that was actively used rather than sparsely visited.
The limestone hills also offered another resource that would have been important to Mesolithic tool-users: good quality flint. Flint is a fine-grained silica rock that fractures predictably when struck, producing sharp edges suitable for cutting, scraping, and piercing. Flint is the primary material of Mesolithic tool technology in Britain, and its availability in the Mendip region would have been a significant attractant for communities that depended on flint tools for hunting, food processing, and other activities.
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## Radiocarbon Dating: How We Know When He Lived
The date of approximately 10,000 years before the present for Cheddar Man rests primarily on radiocarbon dating — a technique that has been applied to the specimen on more than one occasion, with consistent results.