By the 1950s, radiocarbon dating had been developed, and it became possible for the first time to assign actual calendar ages to prehistoric specimens. The absolute chronology that radiocarbon provided transformed archaeology: sites and individuals that had been dated only by relative methods — this is older than that, which is consistent with this cultural phase — could now be placed in real time. Cheddar Man could be placed at approximately 10,000 years before present.
By the 1990s, the polymerase chain reaction and early DNA sequencing methods made it possible, at least in principle, to recover short fragments of ancient DNA and draw limited conclusions from them. The 1997 Sykes study was at the leading edge of what was technically feasible at that moment: it recovered mitochondrial DNA, compared it with a small sample of modern people, and established a matrilineal connection. That was, genuinely, an impressive achievement with the tools available.
The early twenty-first century saw the development of next-generation sequencing — massively parallel sequencing methods that could read millions of short DNA fragments simultaneously and cheaply. Combined with improved ancient DNA laboratory protocols, better computational assembly methods, and growing databases of comparison genomes, these technologies made the 2018 analysis possible. A near-complete genome from a 10,000-year-old British individual, assembled from millions of short degraded fragments by algorithms that account for ancient DNA damage: this was a technical achievement of a completely different order from anything that had been possible before.
The next steps in the accumulation of knowledge about Cheddar Man and his contemporaries will involve further applications of ever-improving technology to ever-larger datasets. Genomic science will continue to refine the understanding of pigmentation genetics, potentially allowing more precise predictions. Archaeological science will continue to extract information from the physical and chemical record. And the interpretive frameworks for making sense of what all this evidence means will continue to evolve as the field accumulates and debates new findings.