The 10,000-Year-Old Man Found In A British Cave — And The DNA Test That Changed What Scientists Thought Early Europeans Looked Like
The Limits Of What DNA Can Tell Us
The Cheddar Man study was careful to acknowledge the limits of what ancient DNA analysis can and cannot reveal, and those limits deserve explicit discussion.
The pigmentation predictions — dark to black skin, blue eyes — are probabilistic rather than certain.
They are based on the comparison of genetic variants to patterns established in living populations, and the statistical confidence of those predictions depends on how many relevant variants were recovered, how well-characterized those variants are in modern genomic studies, and how applicable the modern reference populations are to the ancient context.
The researchers themselves were explicit about this.
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