Cheddar Man was not the only Western Hunter-Gatherer individual to have had his genome analyzed before 2018, though he was the oldest British individual to receive whole-genome sequencing.

The La Braña individual, found at a site in the mountains of León in northwestern Spain, had been analyzed in a landmark 2012 paper.

La Braña 1, as the individual is designated, lived approximately 7,000 years ago — roughly 3,000 years after Cheddar Man, but still well within the Mesolithic period and before the arrival of Neolithic farmers in the Iberian Peninsula.

The genetic analysis of La Braña 1 showed a striking result: dark skin, blue eyes, dark hair.