One of the temptations in telling the Cheddar Man story is to oversimplify: to say that “the first Briton had dark skin,” and leave it there as a simple reversal of prior assumptions.

The actual story is more complex and more interesting.

Cheddar Man is the earliest individual from whom a complete genome has been obtained in Britain.

He is not certainly “the first Briton” in the sense of the absolute first modern human to inhabit the island — earlier Paleolithic humans were in Britain, though they probably did not establish continuous habitation.

He is the oldest individual from the population that established continuous British habitation, which is a more precise and more accurate statement.

The claim that he represents “what early Britons looked like” is true in the sense that his characteristics are consistent with the WHG population more broadly.