The evidence does not unambiguously support any single explanation.

What is certain is that the replacement happened, and that the world of Cheddar Man and his contemporaries — the Mesolithic world of dark-skinned, blue-eyed hunter-gatherers moving through the forests of postglacial Europe — was largely gone within a few thousand years of his death.

That world survived in a specific sense in the ten percent contribution to modern European genetics that still traces back to the WHG population.

But the communities themselves, the specific cultures and languages and ways of knowing the land that the WHG developed and transmitted — these are essentially gone, preserved only in the most fragmentary archaeological traces and in the genes of their descendants, who do not know whose genes they carry.