This is what the dark-skinned, blue-eyed young man from Gough’s Cave has to tell us about the world he lived in and the world that came after him.

The stone gave him back.

The DNA gave him a face.

And the face changed how we see the past.

The Archaeologist’s Eye: What A Century Of Study Built

When Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum said he had studied Cheddar Man for more than forty years but “could never have believed that we would one day have his whole genome,” he was describing the experience of an archaeologist who had watched the field transform around a specimen that remained the same.

Stringer’s career spans the transition from osteological analysis as the primary tool of paleoanthropology — measuring bones, describing morphology, inferring population relationships from physical characteristics — to the ancient DNA revolution that has largely transformed the field.