One specific designation that the 2018 study established deserves emphasis: Cheddar Man represents the oldest British individual to have had his whole genome sequenced.

This is not a trivial distinction.

Whole-genome sequencing — reconstructing the full sequence of all three billion base pairs in a genome, rather than examining only specific targeted positions — provides a vastly more powerful analytical tool than partial genetic analysis.

With a whole genome, researchers can examine every position in the DNA simultaneously, rather than just the positions they had previously identified as informative.

They can look at the full spectrum of genetic variants, compare them to both ancient and modern reference populations with maximum statistical power, and make much more precise inferences about ancestry, pigmentation, and other characteristics.