SKELETON FROM 10 000 YEARS AGO FOUND IN BRITAIN HAS A LIVING DESCENDANT

Researchers made a startling find in 1903 while working on a cave excavation in Somerset, UK's Cheddar Gorge. One of the earliest modern humans in Britain is a skeleton of a Homo sapiens, who lived some 10,000 years ago. The old man, now known as "Cheddar Man," has lately made headlines once more. According to scientists using contemporary DNA tests, the Mesolithic person had dark skin and pale blue eyes. The idea that Cheddar Man's contemporary descendant lives less than a mile from the caverns where his remains lay for millennia is just as amazing as the fact that his face has been brought back to life.

In the early 20th century, this old Brit was accidentally found while renovating the drainage system at the popular tourist destination, Gough's Cave. It was soon established that the skeleton was the oldest modern person found in the British Isles. The ancient man, who was just 5 feet 5 inches tall, was a hunter-gatherer from Mesolithic times and perished in his thirties. At the time, when England was still a forested country connected to Europe, cave burials were common. Curiously, Cheddar Man was discovered buried by himself.

DNA was taken from Cheddar Man's inner ear bone in 2018 by the Natural History Museum in London. Since then, experts at Kennis & Kennis Reconstructions and the University College of London have utilised this DNA to recreate his face. Earlier attempts to do so portrayed him as having light skin. However, recent studies have linked several skin-colour-related DNA characteristics to ancient people from sub-Saharan Africa. Cheddar Man's skin tone was probably darker than that of other Mesolithic individuals living in Europe at the time.

According to Dr. Tom Booth, a museum researcher, "he is just one individual, but also representative of the population of Europe at that period." They were dark-skinned, with dark brown hair and, for the most part, blue or green eyes. People's assumptions about what kinds of hereditary features go together are subverted by Cheddar Man. It appears that pale eyes arrived in Europe much before blond hair or pale complexion, which didn't appear until after farming .He reminds us that the feature pairs we are accustomed to seeing now are not fixed and that you cannot infer what individuals looked like in the past from their appearance in the present.

One of the first humans to settle in what would become Britain was Cheddar Man. His descendants continue to live on the island even after more than 10,000 years have gone by since his passing. The genetic European population that Cheddar Man belonged to is the ancestor of about 10% of the present-day British population. A later wave of migrant farmers essentially supplanted this population. In 1997, however, DNA tests showed that ancient human matrilineal ties were still present in the area. High school instructor Adrian Targett was a DNA match. He is still the "farthest traced descendant by DNA," having been born near the last resting place of Cheddar Man.