The 2018 whole-genome analysis provided a much more powerful and nuanced picture.

While the specific individual-to-individual comparison of the 1997 study had limited interpretive power, the broader finding from the whole-genome analysis was that approximately ten percent of the ancestry of modern white British people can be traced to the Western Hunter-Gatherer population to which Cheddar Man belonged.

This figure — ten percent — is striking because it implies that about ninety percent of modern British ancestry comes from the later populations: primarily the Neolithic Anatolian farmers and the Bronze Age steppe pastoralists who arrived later.

The genetic continuity of the Western Hunter-Gatherers in modern British people is real but minority: the WHG ancestry is present, but diluted by the much larger genetic contribution of the subsequent population movements.