Some researchers have suggested that disease — the new infectious diseases that came with farming communities and their domesticated animals — may have played a role in depopulating the indigenous hunter-gatherer communities.

Others emphasize the demographic advantage of farming populations, which could support substantially more people per square kilometer than hunting and gathering.

Whatever the specific mechanisms, the genetic evidence is clear: within a few millennia of the Neolithic farmers’ arrival in Britain, the Western Hunter-Gatherers were largely gone, their genetic heritage reduced to the roughly ten percent contribution that their descendants carry in modern British genomes.

Cheddar Man was part of a population that was replaced.