Cheddar Man’s face is a ghost from that lost world.

A specific, vivid, human ghost — reconstructed from bones and DNA, given back the appearance of life, but a ghost nonetheless.

Looking at that face, you are looking at something that was once entirely real and is now gone — not in the sense that the person was ephemeral, but in the sense that the world he inhabited, the culture he was part of, the language he spoke, the stories he knew — all of it is as thoroughly lost as if it had never existed.

Except for the bones.