Why This Changes The Picture Of European Prehistory

The significance of the Cheddar Man findings extends far beyond the characteristics of a single individual.

They are a window into a world that was fundamentally different from anything that modern Europeans have experienced or that history has recorded.

The Mesolithic Europe that Cheddar Man inhabited was a world in which the peoples of the continent — from Britain in the northwest to Spain in the southwest, from Germany in the north to the Balkans in the southeast — shared a common genetic ancestry, a common broadly similar lifestyle (hunting and gathering), and, as the ancient DNA evidence suggests, a broadly similar appearance: dark skin, light eyes, dark hair.

This was not the Europe of the Romans, who would have found Mesolithic Europeans as exotic as the peoples of Africa or Asia.