The same drips of water that have been falling from the ceiling of Gough’s Cave for millions of years were falling when Cheddar Man was alive and are still falling now.

The geological continuity of the cave is what made the biological preservation possible and what makes the connection between his time and ours tangible.

Standing in the cave, knowing that this is where he lived or died or was buried, you are in the same physical space as a person who walked the British landscape before Britain was Britain, before it was an island, before any of the history that has since happened had happened.

That connection — across ten thousand years, through the medium of limestone and the chemistry of DNA — is what ancient DNA science makes possible.