And what it shows is that the people who first inhabited postglacial Europe looked nothing like the populations that live there today, that the genetic and phenotypic makeup of European populations is the result of not one but multiple major population turnovers over the past ten thousand years, and that assumptions about what “originally European” means are fundamentally wrong.

Cheddar Man is the most vivid single example of this broader story.

His dark skin and blue eyes are not just an interesting characteristic of one individual; they are a data point that challenges assumptions about the deep history of the people who would come to inhabit Britain.

The Living Descendants: Ten Percent Of Britain

The statement that approximately ten percent of the ancestry of modern white British people can be traced to the Western Hunter-Gatherer population needs some unpacking, because it is easily misunderstood.

It does not mean that one in ten modern British people has a WHG ancestor in the recent genealogical past.