Cheddar Man, with his pure Western Hunter-Gatherer ancestry, represents the starting point before any of the subsequent admixture occurred.

He is, genetically, a simpler story than modern people: one source population, without the later layers.

The layers came later.

The Story The Land Tells

The Mendip Hills of Somerset are, today, a landscape of limestone grassland and hawthorn hedgerows, ancient dry-stone walls, and the occasional hill fort from the Iron Age.

The modern landscape is almost entirely agricultural — shaped by ten thousand years of human intervention, from the Neolithic clearance of the primeval forest through the medieval field systems to the modern farm economy.

Under this agricultural landscape is the geology: the carboniferous limestone of the Mendips, the same rock that forms the walls of Cheddar Gorge and the chambers of Gough’s Cave.