The answer is: it confirmed and extended a picture that was already emerging from other ancient DNA work, but made it vivid and immediate in a way that earlier technical publications had not.

It showed that the people who first established continuous habitation in Britain had dark skin — that the light skin associated with modern British people is not ancient but derived, the product of population movements that began thousands of years after Cheddar Man was alive.

It showed that these people had a combination of physical characteristics — dark skin, blue eyes — that looks paradoxical to modern eyes but that reflects the specific evolutionary history of pigmentation in different lineages.

It showed that the people of the Mesolithic were real individuals, with specific faces and specific genetics, who inhabited a real world and can be recovered, partially, through the combination of preservation and science.