The relationship between museum collections of ancient human remains and the scientific and public knowledge they enable is a complex ethical landscape, particularly when the remains are those of Indigenous peoples.

The Cheddar Man case is somewhat different from many contentious repatriation cases — the WHG population has no surviving descendant community that has the kind of direct cultural and genealogical relationship to the remains that characterizes the most sensitive repatriation situations.

But the ethical questions about the custody and use of ancient human remains remain important regardless.

The Final Question: What Does It Mean?

Everything the science has established about Cheddar Man — his dark skin, his blue eyes, his Western Hunter-Gatherer ancestry, his lactose intolerance, his age at death, his diet — is part of the answer to a question that the title of this article posed: what did the DNA test change about what scientists thought early Europeans looked like?