Those assumptions, as it turned out, were largely wrong.

In February 2018, researchers at University College London and the Natural History Museum in London announced the results of a full genome sequencing of Cheddar Man’s DNA — the first complete genome sequenced from the oldest near-complete skeleton found in Britain.

What they found was striking enough that it reached every major news outlet in the world within twenty-four hours.

Cheddar Man had dark to black skin pigmentation.

He had blue eyes.

He had dark, curly hair.

The combination was the opposite of what most people assumed when they imagined someone called “the first Briton.” The expectation — tacit, unexamined, embedded in decades of museum displays and popular reconstructions — had been fair skin.

What the DNA said was something entirely different.

The finding was not simply a curiosity about one individual.

It was a data point in a much larger story that ancient DNA science has been assembling piece by piece over the past two decades: the story of who the Europeans of the deep past actually were, where they came from, and why they looked nothing like the people who later came to occupy the same territory.

That story begins in a limestone cave.

It ends somewhere larger.

Gough’s Cave And What Lives In The Dark

Cheddar Gorge is one of the more dramatic landscapes in the otherwise gentle English county of Somerset.