Everything about Cheddar Man totally explained
Cheddar Man is the name given to the remains of a human male found in
Gough's Cave in
Cheddar Gorge,
Somerset,
England. The remains date to approximately
7150 BC, and it appears that he died a violent death, perhaps related to the
cannibalism practiced in the area at the time. He is Britain’s oldest complete human skeleton.
The remains were excavated in 1903, and currently reside in the
Natural History Museum in London, with a replica in the "Cheddar Man and the Cannibals" museum in
Cheddar village.
Mitochondrial DNA testing
In the late
1990s,
Bryan Sykes of
Oxford University first sequenced the
mitochondrial DNA of Cheddar Man, with DNA extracted from one of Cheddar Man's
molars. Cheddar Man was determined to have belonged to a branch of mitochondrial
haplogroup U, a haplogroup which is especially common in Britain, Ireland and the Basque Country of northern Spain and south western France. Haplogroup U is generally found to be most common in southern and western Europe and may have originated in West Asia.
Bryan Sykes' research into Cheddar Man was filmed as he performed it. As a means of connecting Cheddar Man to the living residents of Cheddar village, he compared mitochondrial DNA taken from twenty living residents of the village to that extracted from Cheddar Man’s molar. It produced two exact matches and one match with a single mutation. The two exact matches were schoolchildren, and their names were not released. The close match was a history teacher named Adrian Targett.
This modern connection to Cheddar Man (who died at least three thousand years before
agriculture began in Britain) makes very credible the theory that modern-day Britons are not all descended from Middle-Eastern migratory farmers, but rather modern Britons are descended from ancient European
Palaeolithic and
Mesolithic hunter-gatherer tribes who much later on adopted farming.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Cheddar Man'.
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