For Britain specifically, the Mesolithic-to-Neolithic transition is one of the most dramatic documented demographic events in the island’s history: a near-complete genetic replacement within a period of perhaps a few centuries to a millennium, associated with the arrival of a new economy, new material culture, and presumably new languages and social structures. Understanding this transition at the resolution that ancient DNA now makes possible gives researchers insight into how profound and rapid demographic change can be — and into how little continuity there may sometimes be between consecutive human populations in the same geographic place.
Cheddar Man stands at the beginning of this story for Britain — the oldest nearly complete skeleton, the oldest sequenced British genome, a representative of the population that would be mostly replaced by the people who came after him. His bones in their museum case have outlasted that replacement by six thousand years. The DNA from his inner ear has now, after ten millennia, told us something about who he was.
The story of what it means, and what more remains to be learned, is still being written.
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## The Long Arc from Discovery to DNA: A Century of Accumulating Knowledge
The distance between 1903, when workmen found the bones in Gough’s Cave, and 2018, when the DNA findings were announced, spans not just 115 years but entire paradigm shifts in what scientists can know about prehistoric people.
In 1903, the tools for studying ancient skeletal remains were essentially limited to what could be seen and measured. Physical anthropologists had calibers, measuring tapes, and the accumulated tradition of craniometry — the measurement of skulls to assign them to racial and population types. They could compare skull shapes, estimate brain volume from cranial capacity, note the development of brow ridges and the configuration of the jaw, and draw inferences about the individual’s place within the classificatory systems of the period.