Cheddar Man: Britain's Oldest Near-Complete Skeleton

Cheddar Man is the skeleton of a young man who lived in what is now Somerset, England, roughly 10,000 years ago, during the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age. Found in Gough’s Cave in Cheddar Gorge in 1903, he is often called Britain’s oldest nearly complete human skeleton. In 2018 a study of his genome produced a striking reconstruction of his face and changed how many people imagined the first settlers of post-Ice Age Britain.

Background: Britain after the Ice Age

At the height of the last glaciation, around 20,000 years ago, much of Britain was covered by ice or too cold for permanent human settlement. As the climate warmed, people returned from continental Europe. By about 11,700 years ago, at the start of the Holocene (the present warm period), forests of birch, pine and later hazel and oak were spreading across the land.

In Cheddar Man’s time Britain was not yet an island. A low-lying landscape now called Doggerland joined eastern England to the continent across what is today the southern North Sea. Rising seas gradually drowned it, and Britain is generally thought to have become separated from the mainland around 6500 to 6000 BC.

People in Mesolithic Britain lived by hunting, fishing and gathering. They hunted red deer, roe deer, wild boar and aurochs (an extinct wild ox), collected hazelnuts and plants, and used small, carefully worked flint tools called microliths, often set into arrows or spears. Sites such as Star Carr in Yorkshire show how such communities used lakes and wetlands.

Gough’s Cave and the 1903 discovery

Cheddar Gorge is a limestone ravine on the southern edge of the Mendip Hills, riddled with caves. In the late 19th century a local entrepreneur, Richard Cox Gough, and his family opened the cave that now bears his name as a show cave for paying visitors.

In December 1903, workmen digging a drainage trench near the cave entrance uncovered a human skeleton lying in the cave earth. Parts of it were encrusted with stalagmite (mineral deposits left by dripping water), which helped convince observers that it was very old. The bones were studied by scientists of the day and eventually passed to the Natural History Museum in London, where they remain.

At the time there was no reliable way to date the remains. Estimates varied widely until radiocarbon dating, developed after the Second World War, was applied to the bones in the later 20th century. It showed that Cheddar Man belonged to the early Mesolithic, a few thousand years after the end of the Ice Age.

Who was Cheddar Man?

Study of the skeleton shows that Cheddar Man was a fairly slight man, about 166 centimetres (5 ft 5 in) tall, who probably died in his twenties. His remains are unusually complete for such an early date, which is why they matter so much to archaeologists.

A hole in the front of his skull has attracted much attention. Some early writers suggested a violent blow, but many specialists now think it reflects an infection or other disease. The cause of his death is unknown.

It is also uncertain whether he was deliberately buried. Gough’s Cave contains other human remains from different periods, and the exact circumstances in which his body came to lie there cannot be reconstructed with confidence. What is clear is that people of his time used the caves of the Mendips and the surrounding landscape.

Older finds in the same cave

Gough’s Cave is famous for more than Cheddar Man. Excavations in the 1980s and later recovered human and animal bones from a much earlier occupation, around 14,700 years ago, at the end of the Ice Age.

Some of these older human bones carry cut marks and breakage patterns consistent with butchery. Several skulls appear to have been carefully shaped into cups or bowls, a practice studied in detail by researchers from the Natural History Museum in a 2011 study. These finds are often described as evidence of ritual cannibalism, although the motives of the people involved remain debated. They are unrelated to Cheddar Man, who lived some 5,000 years later.

DNA studies: from 1997 to 2018

In 1997 geneticists extracted mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited through the maternal line, from one of Cheddar Man’s teeth. The work, featured in a television programme, placed him in a maternal lineage known as haplogroup U5, common among European hunter-gatherers. It also reported a match with a resident of Cheddar village, a result that drew public interest but says little more than that this lineage still survives.

The major breakthrough came in 2018. A team at the Natural History Museum and University College London, including Ian Barnes, Selina Brace and Mark Thomas, drilled a small hole into the dense petrous bone behind the ear and recovered enough DNA to sequence Cheddar Man’s whole genome. The work, made with a Channel 4 documentary, was later published as part of a broader study of ancient British genomes in Nature Ecology & Evolution in 2019.

The genome showed that Cheddar Man belonged to a population geneticists call Western Hunter-Gatherers. Their closest known relatives were Mesolithic people from sites in Spain, Hungary and Luxembourg. The study also indicated that he was very probably unable to digest milk as an adult, as was typical before dairy farming spread.

The 2018 reconstruction

Using the genetic results and a high-resolution scan of the skull, the Dutch model-makers Adrie and Alfons Kennis produced a lifelike head. It showed a man with dark to black skin, dark curly hair and blue eyes. The image was widely published around the world in February 2018 and became one of the most discussed archaeological stories of the year.

The scientists involved stressed that the skin colour was a prediction based on known genetic variants. Such predictions are probabilistic, and some researchers have pointed out that the genetics of skin pigmentation is not fully understood, so an intermediate shade is possible. Even so, the finding fits a wider pattern: genetic studies suggest that the light skin common in Europe today became widespread only after the arrival of farming populations and later migrations.

Myths and facts

Myth: Cheddar Man is the oldest human in Britain. He is the oldest nearly complete skeleton, but much older human remains exist. The Red Lady of Paviland in Wales is about 33,000 years old, and fragments from sites such as Boxgrove and Swanscombe are hundreds of thousands of years old.

Myth: modern Britons descend directly from Cheddar Man’s people. Genetic research indicates that Britain’s hunter-gatherers were largely replaced by farmers arriving from the continent around 4000 BC, as described in the article on farming in Neolithic Britain. Researchers involved in the 2018 study estimated that roughly 10 per cent of the ancestry of many people of British descent today relates to Western Hunter-Gatherer populations, largely via later mixing elsewhere in Europe.

Myth: he was murdered. The skull lesion was once read as a sign of violence, but disease is now considered a likely explanation, and his cause of death remains unknown.

By the numbers

Timeline

• c. 12,700 BC: People of the late Ice Age use Gough’s Cave; some human remains show signs of butchery.
• c. 9700 BC: The Holocene begins and forests spread across Britain.
• c. 7150 BC: Approximate lifetime of Cheddar Man (published radiocarbon estimates range from about 8500 to 7000 BC).
• c. 6500–6000 BC: Rising seas cut Britain off from continental Europe.
• c. 4000 BC: Farming reaches Britain with newcomers from the continent.
• 1903, December: Workmen find the skeleton while digging a drainage trench in Gough’s Cave.
• 1997: Mitochondrial DNA is extracted from one of his teeth.
• 2018, February: The Natural History Museum announces his whole genome and unveils the Kennis reconstruction.
• 2019: The genome study is published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Why it matters

Cheddar Man offers a rare, almost complete glimpse of a person from Mesolithic Britain, long before farming, metal or monuments such as Stonehenge. His genome has made him a symbol of how ancient DNA can transform our picture of the past, showing that the earliest post-Ice Age Britons looked quite different from many of the people who live there today, and that the population of Britain has been reshaped by migration many times.