It is simply limestone, shaped by water, indifferent to the significance of what it contains.

But what it contained changed what we know about the people who first called Britain home.

What it contained is a face, a genome, a story — small, specific, human — from a world that existed before any British history was written, before any British history could be written, in the time before Britain was an island.

The man from the cave looked at this landscape with dark-skinned, blue-eyed attention.

He knew it in ways that its current inhabitants do not.