The skeleton was transported to the Natural History Museum in London, where it has been housed and studied for more than a century.

Its physical characteristics were analyzed repeatedly as methods improved.

By the mid-twentieth century, radiocarbon dating — developed in the late 1940s — allowed researchers to get a more precise date: the bones were approximately 9,000 radiocarbon years old, which calibrates to roughly 10,000 calendar years before the present.

This placed Cheddar Man at the very beginning of Britain’s Mesolithic period, among the first people to establish what the DigVentures team called “continuous habitation” of the island after the most recent glacial period.

He was not the first modern human to reach Britain — there is evidence of earlier Paleolithic presence — but he represented the population from which continuous British occupation derives.