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 world that Cheddar Man inhabited was transformed, beginning roughly 6,000 years ago, by the arrival of farming.

The Neolithic transition in Britain — the shift from hunter-gatherer subsistence to farming and animal husbandry — was one of the most profound transformations in the island’s history.

It involved not just changes in food production but changes in settlement patterns, in the organization of communities, in the built environment (Neolithic people built the monuments and megalithic structures that dot the British landscape), and in the genetics of the population.

The ancient DNA evidence has established that the Neolithic transition in Britain was driven largely by the immigration of new people from continental Europe, who were themselves part of the agricultural expansion that had originated in Anatolia roughly 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.