‘Cheddar Man,’ Britain’s Oldest Skeleton, Had Dark Skin, DNA Shows<br />Natural History Museum said that I first studied Cheddar Man more than 40 years ago, but could never have believed<br />that we would one day have his whole genome — the oldest British one to date,<br />Yoan Diekmann said that What may seem a truth — that people who feel British should<br />have white skin — through time it’s not all something that is an immutable truth,<br />The new research shows that Cheddar Man belonged to a population known as Western<br />hunter-gatherers, who first migrated to Europe about 14,000 years ago, he said.<br />Archaeologists also found bones belonging to early human cannibals in Gough’s Cave<br />that are thought to have existed nearly 5,000 years before Cheddar Man, but their DNA profile has no direct ancestry to him even though they were found in the same place.<br />Scientists have now reconstructed his features, demonstrating<br />that he was part of a population of ancient Western Europeans that, scientists have shown in recent years, had dark skin.<br />He is "Cheddar Man," Britain’s oldest complete skeleton, which was discovered in 1903<br />in Gough’s Cave near the village of Cheddar in Somerset, in southwest England.<br />Research has shown that fair skin pigmentation — long considered a defining feature of Europe — only goes back less than 6,000 years.
