Cheddar Man: Somerset's 10,000 year-old Mesolithic skeleton

His story is an amazing one...

In 1903, workmen were digging a drainage trench in Gough’s Cave, Cheddar Gorge, when they found human remains.

They turned out to be the remains of Cheddar Man, as he became known, hidden under a stalagmite for thousands of years.

At around 10,000 years old, Cheddar Man is the oldest almost complete skeleton of our species, Homo sapiens, to be discovered in Britain – making him an important artefact for scientists, palaeontologists and historians.

Research and investigations, including radiocarbon dating and sophisticated DNA analysis, has revealed details about the appearance, life and death of Cheddar Man.

Groundbreaking research documented on TV in 2018 found that Cheddar Man, who lived around 300 generations ago, had dark skin, blue eyes and curly hair.

Previous reconstructions of him, which were not based on DNA, depicted him with a lighter skin tone.

Pale skin was likely brought to Britain by a migration of farming people as agriculture spread from the Middle East around 6,000 years ago.

The Life of Cheddar Man

Cheddar Man was around 5ft 5in tall and weighed about 10 stone when he died, aged in his twenties.

It is believed that his community lived in groups of 30 to 50 people in shelters made of wood and animal skin.

He was part of a population of hunter-gatherers, and his healthy teeth suggest he had a good diet which likely consisted of red deer, aurochs (large wild cattle extinct since the seventeenth century) and some freshwater fish, alongside fruit, seeds and nuts.

His group would have used tools like flint spears on wooden shafts to hunt. 

Professor Larry Barham of Liverpool University, who wrote In Search of Cheddar Man, said: "They would each specialise in hunting, trapping, fishing or their knowledge of plants.

"Whoever is going out with one task brings it back to the group, so it makes it effective.

"Children would watch in the camp and learn quickly what they needed to do in their adult lives and how they would survive." 

Mesolithic - or Middle Stone Age - sites from other parts of the country, like Star Carr in North Yorkshire, indicate that Cheddar Man’s community may have worn red deer skull-caps and possessed semiprecious stones, but this is not certain. 

Evidence from Yorkshire also suggests that Cheddar Man's group kept dogs, which were used for hunting and guarding their camps. 

The landscape he experienced would have been bleak after an Ice Age, but forests were growing which allowed them to forage for food. 

Ironically for a man discovered in Cheddar, he was lactose intolerant – like all humans across Europe until the Bronze Age – so he was unable to digest milk as an adult.

Fractures on the surface of his skull suggest that he suffered a violent death, and another hole in his skull may have been caused by an infection, although it also could be damage from the skeleton’s excavation.

Professor Barham said: "He has a knock on his head, so it is possible that contributed to his early death.

"Before people farmed and before modern medicine, life expectancy was much shorter. But if they lived past childhood they had a good chance of getting to an old man... of 40." 

He may have been buried in Gough’s Cave by members of his tribe, but communal burials were common.

One of Britain’s biggest Mesolithic cemeteries was located in nearby Aveline’s Hole, which contained around 50 bodies from a 100 to 200-year period.

Cheddar Man was found alone, so he may have died in the cave. 

When he was alive, Britain was connected to continental Europe by Doggerland, which is now submerged beneath the North Sea.  

Britain has been inhabited for around 11,000 years (it had been inhabited before this, but cold weather drove early populations out), and Cheddar Man’s population was part of a wave of migrants who crossed Doggerland to reach Britain.

Genetic analysis and creation of a 3D model

When Cheddar Man was discovered, there were claims the skeleton was between 40,000 and 80,000 years old.

Radiocarbon dating carried out in the 1970s found that he lived around 10,000 years ago.

More recently, researchers from the National History Museum extracted DNA from Cheddar Man’s petrous (or inner ear bone, the densest bone in the human body) and a team from University College London analysed his genome – our genetic ‘blueprint’.

‘Paleo artists’ Alfons and Adrie Kennis measured Cheddar Man’s skeleton and scanned his skull which, alongside the analysis of his DNA, was used to create a 3D model of his head.

The twins, who usually create models of Neanderthals, spent three months creating Cheddar Man.  

Channel 4 documented the remodelling process in The First Brit: Secrets of the 100 Year Old Man, which aired in February 2018.

Alfons said: “It's really nice to make a more graceful man, not a heavy-browed Neanderthal. So we were very excited that it was a guy from after the Ice Age. We were very interested in what kind of human he was.

“With the new DNA information, it was really revolutionary. And it allowed us to look more at race. This revealed stuff that we'd never have known before.”

The remains of European hunter-gatherers like Cheddar Man have also been found in Spain, Luxembourg and Hungary, and DNA analysis of their remains found that they shared Cheddar Man’s dark skin and blue eyes.

Professor Ian Barnes, research leader at the Natural History Museum, said: “For me, it's not just the skin colour that's interesting, it's that combination of features that make him look not like anyone that you'd see today.

“Not just dark skin and blue eyes, because you can get that combination, but also the face shape. So all of this combines together and make him just not the same as people you see around today.”

It is likely that pale skin reached Britain thousands of years after Cheddar Man’s death, when a population of farming people migrated. 

Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum, said: “These farming people would have had relatively poor diets, based only on one or two cereal crops, and would have lacked vitamin D.

“By contrast, hunter-gatherers, although few in number, probably had very healthy diets with lots of fish and liver that were rich in vitamin D." 

As well as being present in food, vitamin D can also be synthesised in our skin using sunlight – so the farmers may have evolved pale skin to be able to produce more vitamin D.

“Farming may have provided poorer diets in those days but it also allowed far greater numbers of people to live per acre of land compared to those who lived as hunter-gatherers,” said Stringer. 

“In other words, they had the numbers and so, once farming became established in Britain, the genes for lighter skin would have taken over the population.”

When the 3D model was unveiled, Alfons said: “People define themselves by which country they're from, and they assume that their ancestors were just like them. And then suddenly new research shows that we used to be a totally different people with a different genetic makeup.

"People will be surprised, and maybe it will make immigrants feel a bit more involved in the story. And maybe it gets rid of the idea that you have to look a certain way to be from somewhere. We are all immigrants.”

About 10% of the genes of modern Europeans come from Mesolithic hunter-gatherers like Cheddar Man.