Reconstructions had been made over the decades, based on osteological analysis and general assumptions about what people of the period looked like.

These reconstructions had given him light or medium skin pigmentation.

The DNA analysis would change that.

The Ancient DNA Revolution

To understand what the 2018 Cheddar Man study accomplished, it is necessary to understand what ancient DNA science is and what it has done to our knowledge of the human past.

The study of ancient DNA — genetic material recovered from archaeological specimens — has been one of the most transformative scientific developments in archaeology and human paleontology in the past quarter century.

It has fundamentally revised our understanding of who populated the world in the deep past, where people came from, how populations moved and mixed, and what the people of the distant past actually looked like.