The oldest-known Briton had “dark to black” skin – along with blue eyes – according to groundbreaking new analysis of his 10,000-year-old remains revealed today.
Britain’s oldest fully preserved skeleton, “Cheddar Man,” was unearthed more than a century ago in Gough’s Cave in Somerset.
According to the BBC, scientists from Britain’s Natural History Museum and University College London extracted DNA from Cheddar Man’s 10,000-year-old skeleton and passed it on to scientists at the University College London, who used science and technology to create a facial reconstruction showing what Cheddar Man would have looked like.
“I’ve been studying the skeleton of Cheddar Man for about 40 years,” Chris Stringer, the museum’s research leader in human origins, told the BBC. “So to come face-to-face with what this guy could have looked like — and that striking combination of the hair, the face, the eye color and that dark skin: something a few years ago we couldn’t have imagined, and yet that’s what the scientific data show.”