These earliest visitors to Gough’s Cave left evidence of an activity that is deeply disturbing to modern sensibilities: they were processing and consuming human bodies.

The bones found in the site from this early period show clear evidence of defleshing — cut marks made by stone tools across the bones — and cracking to extract marrow.

Some of the bones had been worked into tools.

What this represents — ritual cannibalism, funerary defleshing, something else entirely — is a question that researchers have debated without fully resolving.

After this early occupation, there is a gap in the human record at Gough’s Cave — a period when the cave was not occupied, or when any occupation left no recoverable trace.

And then, roughly 10,000 years ago, the person now known as Cheddar Man appears in the record.