What will not change is the fundamental fact: a human being lived in Somerset 10,000 years ago. His bones were preserved by chance in a limestone cave. A century after their discovery, a small amount of his genetic material was read, for the first time, by scientists with tools that had not existed when his remains were first found.
What they read changed our picture of his world, and of the long human story that eventually, after many turnings, led to the world we inhabit today.
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## A Note on Nomenclature: “First Briton” and What the Label Does and Doesn’t Mean
Media coverage of Cheddar Man — including the Channel 4 documentary “The First Brit” — sometimes used language suggesting that Cheddar Man was among the first people ever to inhabit Britain, or the first modern human in the island. These framings are worth examining carefully because they compress a complex reality into a phrase that can mislead.
Britain has evidence of human presence going back hundreds of thousands of years. Boxgrove in West Sussex has yielded remains of Homo heidelbergensis from approximately 500,000 years ago. Pakefield in Suffolk has evidence of human activity from around 700,000 years ago. These are not the same species as Cheddar Man — they are archaic human populations, predecessors in the broad hominin lineage — but they demonstrate that what is now Britain has been in the orbit of hominin occupation for a very long time.
Anatomically modern humans — Homo sapiens of the kind represented by Cheddar Man — were present in Europe from at least 45,000 years ago, and evidence for their presence in Britain during warm intervals of the Upper Palaeolithic predates Cheddar Man substantially. Kent’s Cavern in Devon has yielded modern human jaw fragments argued to date to approximately 44,000 to 41,000 years ago, which would make them among the oldest known modern human remains in northwestern Europe.