The formal excavation that led to the discovery of Cheddar Man’s remains was conducted in 1903 by a team working under Richard Cox Gough, the owner of the cave who had been developing it as a tourist attraction for the previous decade.

The human skeleton was found during this excavation work, buried — or naturally covered — in sediment in one of the inner chambers of the cave.

The bones were not scattered or disturbed in the way that the earlier Paleolithic cannibalistic deposits had been.

This was, or appeared to be, a more deliberate or natural burial: one individual, more or less in place, covered by the accumulating sediment of millennia.

The skeleton was not complete — some bones were missing, and others were fragmented — but it was substantial enough to allow reconstruction of much of the body.