The Skull In The Limestone

The cave goes deep.

Gough’s Cave in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, cuts about 115 meters into the limestone of the Mendip Hills before reaching its innermost chambers.

The walls are cool and damp.

The temperature barely changes year-round.

The darkness is absolute once you leave the light behind.

In 1903, during excavations inside this cave, a workman’s tool struck something that was neither limestone nor sediment.

Bones emerged from the earth.

Human bones.

A skull, portions of a skeleton — and then something more: the almost complete remains of a person who had died in this cave roughly ten millennia before the workmen arrived.

The skeleton was given a name that stuck: Cheddar Man.

Not for any personal characteristic, not for anything the bones revealed about the person who had been buried or had died here, but simply because the cave was in Cheddar, and the cheese came from Cheddar, and the name was apt in the way that simple geographical labels can be.

The man from Cheddar.

For more than a century, scientists studied those bones.

They measured the skull with calipers.

They examined the teeth, which were surprisingly good for someone who had died around the age of twenty-three to twenty-six.

They analyzed the skeleton’s proportions and concluded that this person had stood about five feet five inches tall, had been reasonably well-nourished, and had lived sometime around 9,000 years before the common era — roughly 10,000 years before the moment you are reading this.

They made assumptions about what he looked like.