The connection to other WHG individuals from across Europe — in Spain, Hungary, and Luxembourg, as noted by Professor Thomas — confirmed that Cheddar Man’s population was part of a broad meta-population that had spread across western and central Europe during the Mesolithic.

This was not a genetically isolated British population; it was the western extension of a continental-scale meta-population of hunter-gatherers who shared common ancestry.

The analysis also showed what Cheddar Man’s population was not related to: the Anatolian farmers who would later bring agriculture to Europe, and the steppe pastoralists who would come still later.

These later populations — whose arrival would transform European genetics and, with them, European skin pigmentation — were absent from Cheddar Man’s genome.

He predated both population turnovers.