The Cheddar Man

The Cheddar Man.

Cheddar Man is a human male fossil found in Gough's Cave in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, England. The skeletal remains date to the Mesolithic (ca. 9100 BP, 7100 BC) and it appears that he died a violent death. A large craters like lesion just above the skull's right orbit suggests that the man may have also been suffering from a bone infection.

Excavated in 1903, Cheddar Man is Britain's oldest complete human skeleton. The remains are kept by London's Natural History Museum, in the Human Evolution gallery.

Analysis of his nuclear DNA indicates that he was a typical member of the Western European hunter-gatherer population at the time, with lactose intolerance, probably with light-coloured eyes (most likely green but possibly blue or hazel), dark brown or black hair, and dark or dark-to-black skin, although an intermediate skin colour cannot be ruled out.

Nuclear DNA was extracted from the petrous part of the temporal bone by a team from the Natural History Museum in 2018. While the genetic markers recovered from Cheddar Man were incomplete, they suggested (based on their associations in modern populations whose phenotypes are known) that he probably had green eyes, lactose intolerance, dark curly or wavy hair, and dark or dark-to-black skin, although an intermediate skin colour cannot be ruled out.

These features are typical of the Western European population of the time, now known as Western Hunter-Gatherers, another example being Loschbour man discovered in Luxembourg. This population forms about 10%, on average, of the ancestry of Britons without a recent family history of immigration.

Brown eyes, lactose tolerance, and light skin are common in the modern population of the area. These genes came from later immigration, most of it ultimately from two major waves, the first of Neolithic farmers from the Near East, another of Bronze Age pastoralists, most likely speakers of Indo-European languages, from the Pontic steppe.

Cheddar Man's Y-DNA belonged to an ancient sister branch of modern I2-L38 (I2a2). The I2a2 subclade is still extant in males of the modern British Isles and across other parts of Europe. The mitochondrial DNA of Cheddar Man was discovered to be haplogroup U5b1 by a Natural History Museum study in 2018 using next generation sequencing. Some 65% of western European Mesolithic hunter-gatherers had haplogroup U5; today it is widely distributed, at lower frequencies, across western Eurasia and northern Africa.

 In 1996, Bryan Sykes of the University of Oxford first sequenced the mitochondrial DNA from one of Cheddar Man's molars as U5a using PCR testing. The difference between the older result and the 2018 Natural History Museum result was attributed to the use of older PCR technology and possible contamination.

So facts about the Cheddar Man.

* Why do they call him Cheddar Man?

The Cheddar Man earned his name, not because of his fondness for cheese, which likely wasn't cultivated until around 3,000 years later, but because he was found in Cheddar Gorge in Somerset, England (which is, incidentally, where cheddar cheese originates).

* Why is the Cheddar Man important?

Cheddar Man lived around 10,000 years ago and is the oldest almost complete skeleton of our species, Homo sapiens, ever found in Britain. Research into ancient DNA extracted from the skeleton has helped scientists to build a portrait of Cheddar Man and his life in Mesolithic Britain.

* What was Cheddar Man's DNA?

The I2a2 subclade is still extant in males of the modern British Isles and across other parts of Europe. The mitochondrial DNA of Cheddar Man was discovered to be haplogroup U5b1 by a Natural History Museum study in 2018 using next generation sequencing.

* How was the DNA extracted for Cheddar Man?

To reach this conclusion, researchers extracted DNA from the bone powder in the skeleton's skull. The genetic material was remarkably well preserved, which the team attributes to the fact that Cheddar Man was in a cave for so long