It isn’t at all surprising that ancient Britons were dark skinned — we know the genes behind pigmentation, we have sequenced genomes from skeletons that are thousands of years old, and we know that light skins were the result of a mutation that swept through Europe about 6,000 years ago. So when a reconstruction of Cheddar Man, a 10,000 year old skeleton found in England, is made from the skull plus genomic information, we should expect that he’d be found to have been dark-skinned.
The first modern Britons, who lived about 10,000 years ago, had “dark to black” skin, a groundbreaking DNA analysis of Britain’s oldest complete skeleton has revealed.
The fossil, known as Cheddar Man, was unearthed more than a century ago in Gough’s Cave in Somerset. Intense speculation has built up around Cheddar Man’s origins and appearance because he lived shortly after the first settlers crossed from continental Europe to Britain at the end of the last ice age. People of white British ancestry alive today are descendants of this population.
It was initially assumed that Cheddar Man had pale skin and fair hair, but his DNA paints a different picture, strongly suggesting he had blue eyes, a very dark brown to black complexion and dark curly hair.
The discovery shows that the genes for lighter skin became widespread in European populations far later than originally thought – and that skin colour was not always a proxy for geographic origin in the way it is often seen to be today.
Here’s the reconstruction in a BBC video. Cheddar Man is as we ought to have expected. Actually, the only thing that made me raise my eyebrows is that the research team consists of 6 white men and 1 white woman, kind of like how the SpaceX rocket team was mostly white men, too.
It would be nice if the research effort that is revealing the genetic diversity of our recent ancestors at least reflected a bit of that diversity today.
By the way, the comments on this reconstruction also reveal a tremendous amount of denial from the usual racists who think this is an invention cobbled up by scientists to appease radical leftists. This, also, is not surprising.
No way, a cheddar man should be cheeto-colored. Like, uh… Whatsisname.
Meanwhile, you’ve probably encountered the kerfuffle over Nefertiti – some sculptor “re-created” her and, naturally, she looks mighty white. [newsweek]. It’s not like they don’t have wrapped up bits DNA from the pharoahs, do they?
Racists are definitely having a problem understanding that we’re all African – and fairly recently.
Reminds me of an interview I saw with a British Nationalist on the TV a good few years ago, who claimed that you couldn’t claim to be truly British unless you could trace your line living on British soil back “a thousand generations”. Leaving aside the impossibility of and confusion that would result from such an attempt if you could do it, I thought at the time, “Like, back to the end of the Ice Age?” I guess it shows a dedication to a defective line of reasoning (and probably dodgy history and arithmetic) that might be admirable. I wonder how he’d feel about our approximately 300-generation ancestor if he was interviewed today.
(Of course, the interview was a set-up for a genetics test that showed our boy wasn’t as pure as he’d imagined. Maybe he’s changed his mind since then. Or is just in a state of denial.)
(I realise that comment was made in jest.) Actually, cheddar cheese comes in quite a range of yellow-ish colours. From Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge:
According to the BBC video in the OP, Cheddar Man could not digest milk, so I presume they also, ironically, could not eat cheese.
Is there a theory for why the light skinned mutation spread so much?
@blf #3
Well, he could have eaten it, he just would have had a very sad tummy afterwards!
So you’re saying that YECs are correct and that gawd created humans just 6,000 years ago.
mijobagi@#4:
Is there a theory for why the light skinned mutation spread so much?
It made them more aggressive and violent while simultaneously reducing their empathy.
Wow, this evolutionary psychology stuff is easy.
@4 mijobagi – in one article I read, the speculation was the heavier reliance on cereals in the diet which led to a lack of vitamin D, and people w/ lighter skin color produce more vitamin D when they are in the sun.
@Mijobagi My guess is the theory is as the glacial ice receded during the current interglacial period and humans migrated north, the reduced sun exposure at that latitude caused significant health issues and that natural selection pressure on that small population to cause the rapid distribution of those genes. Succinctly, Small population, strong selection pressure.
How Europeans evolved white skin:
As Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge notes:
What I didn’t realise is there is also a connection to lactose tolerance (as mentioned by Jablonski):
@blf, #3: Common misconception. Not being able to drink milk (lactose intolerant) does not mean one can not eat cheese. You see, when you age cheese, this give the acidifying bacteria time to convert all the lacTOSE to lacTASE and that, most humans can digest. In fact discoveries of ancient pottery show that some of it had little holes all through it… the world’s first cheesecloth… suggesting that dairy animals were first utilized for cheese and not milk. This makes sense since at the time, everybody would be lactose intolerant. That gene for lactose tolerance did not appear for a while after domestication of dairy animals.
Another item of interest: “cheddaring” is a certain process of how one treats the curd. (Chop it up in a certain way and mix it with small amounts of salt prior to molding and aging.) Sorry. I am a cheese maker. (And therefore, blessed.) :-)
This is a really cool discovery and yes, I agree: we need more scientists and we need more diversity!
I’m sure the usual suspects will be claiming this is yet another part of the White Genocide conspiracy, a result of excessive political correctness etc.
Didn’t they find a local man in Cheddar whose DNA showed him to be a direct descendant of Cheddar Man?
Having spent quite some time in that area since my mother was born nearby, I can totally see that bloke as a true Cheddar man with his cheese, cider and pickled onions.
@NelC #2:
That sounds to me like Garry Bushell. He’s a British journalist who years ago wrote for right-wing tabloids and who used to play in a skinhead band (we’re going back to the 80s here, when he also did music journalism on punk and metal, which is where I first read his scribbles). Some of the stuff he wrote in the tabloids was complete trash and he got a reputation for being homophobic. The skinhead thing was more Ska than the ‘Combat 18 White Is Right’ strand (or whatever the fuck they call it now; I can’t even remember what they called it then), but it didn’t help his reputation; that’s probably why he was picked for the television genetics show.
All of the above is the impression I have left from 20-30 years ago, but I do remember watching the telly programme (which must have been about 15 years ago) and have a clear memory of him sitting in his house looking genuinely fascinated when it was revealed that he had a black ancestor from four generations back (or several more over many earlier generations). That’s when — rightly or wrongly — I got the impression that the way he’d been presented earlier in the programme was not entirely balanced.
He still wrote shite in The Sun, though.
Yes, reported in 1997, Briton Is Kin of Stone Age ‘Cheddar Man’:
And 21 years later, we do seem now to have determined their probable hair, skin, and eye colouring.
Didn’t they find a local man in Cheddar whose DNA showed him to be a direct descendant of Cheddar Man?
Not quite. They showed the local man, Adrian Targett, had the same mtDNA as Cheddar Man, U5, meaning they shared a maternal ancestor. (There were two closer matches in the area, but they were children at the time and their names weren’t publicized.) There was a lot of talk about Targett’s ancestors having been in the area for 9,000 years, but in fact U5 was found all over Europe (about 11% of Europeans have it) and could have come from a much later immigrant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_U_(mtDNA)#Haplogroup_U5
Rich Woods @14: Fifteen years ago sounds about right. I’m going from memory, and I don’t think I knew the name at the time. I don’t recall any of the skinhead stuff in the programme, so I guess they only skimmed his history. Only four generations ago, though? Tch. Long cry from “a thousand generations”.
I can’t believe you all missed the truly great discovery about this, the existence of the mullet so long ago.
Both Mugilidae and Mullidae seem to have been around for millions of years. Cheddar Man would be a nearly-invisible nit on their timeline. And isn’t a fish, although I presume they ate some.
“People of white British ancestry alive today are descendants of this population.”
Umm… no. Cheddar Man’s people were overrun by a couple waves of invaders even before the Picts arrived, let alone the Celts, Saxons, and Normans. The chances of any white British being related to him is pretty small, considering.
blf @19
The hair style. Oy vey.
The UK population is less racially diverse than that of the USA, so it is far more likely that any small group would be entirely white.
So complaints that a team of 7 are all white are a bit much.
brasidas69, your claim relies on the skintone probability density function applicable to the UK population* being such that where “[all] 7 are all white” is an unremarkable outcome for an academic research team based there. Sounds like a mildly implausible claim to me; I saw plenty of non-white people the last time I was in the UK.
But the sample population is not random, is it? It’s a subset of the research community that’s the sample, not the UK population at large.
You clearly find it a satisfying explanation that there is nothing to explain, but I think you haven’t substantiated it.
—
* Residents, not necessarily nationals.
@Kestrel #11, you’re partly correct. LacTOSE is milk sugar, a di- saccharide, composed glucose and galactose. LacTASE is the enzyme which hydrolyzes lactose into separate mono-saccharides, both of which healthy adults can digest. Different cheese processes may further oxidize those sugars into other chemicals, all the way to CO2, which is how swiss cheese gets its “eyes”.
Artor @ #20 — It’s reasonable to say that the people of modern Britain are not just the descendants of these people. However, just as there is genetic evidence of Neanderthal in modern humans, I’m willing to bet this guy’s relatives procreated with the people who supplanted them. It’s important to remember that the ancient population migrations you cite, like many others, probably didn’t constitute enough people to actually wipe them out.
The number of Normans, which we have the best records of, was not massive compared to the number of people already living in Britain. Wikipedia cites that about 8,000 Normans and other Europeans migrated to England after 1066 where the existing population is thought to have been a couple of million people. It would have been impractical for the new rulers to wipe out the existing population…who would do the work. Like many conquerors of the past, the Normans took over the legal system and established their language as the language of the aristocracy. The common folks adopted their ways and borrowed their language because they had to. At first intermarriage was rare, but within a hundred years it was common place.
Yknot, #24
Since the cheese pedantry has already begun:
There are some rather large number of Swiss cheeses. The one with the large eyes is the Emmenthal. Other Swiss cheeses I am familiar with (Gruyere, Vasherin, Raclette, various Tommes, and so many small local chesses that I can’t remember the name of) do not have notable eyes, or none at all. It’s a pretty cheesy country, with many varied cheeses!
To Robro
‘It would have been impractical for the new rulers to wipe out the existing population’
History tell us that they had a good try to do just that in the North; the Harrowing of the North.
Demonax @27: There is uncertainty about the degree of destruction involved in the Harrowing of the North. It was highly destructive, but it did not wipe out the inhabitants of the North of England. Many became refugees, and there needed to be some survivors for the Normans to have someone to lord over.
@keusnua #26, To demonstrate how cheesy those cheesy Swiss are, they call their cheeses without eyes “blind cheeses”.
Blessed are the cheesemakers.
@John Morales #23:
Going by WP numbers (87%, not sure if that’s residents or citizens) the naive chance of a random group of 7 all being white is 38%. Of course, that there’s actually a decent chance of it coming up by chance is a long way short of saying that there isn’t systematic bias. There definitely is, it’s just hard to gauge how much impact it has.
Not everyone is convinced: some Daily Mail readers suggest that “Cheddar Man” was a tourist, or that whites are more evolved.
“It’s reasonable to say that the people of modern Britain are not just the descendants of these people.”
As the amount of parents tends to double with every previous generation the probability that all humans are related approaches 1 – just go back far enough. Unless the people of Cheddar Man went extinct one way or another they will have lots and lots of descendants.
@demonax # 27 While the Harrowing certainly seems to have been a horrific campaign (even with all the caveats that NelC #28 rightly adds), it doesn’t impact the general validity of the statement, even without considering the tons of people in the other parts of the modern UK, that weren’t targeted.
The idea of different and subsequent archeologially distinct cultures always being some sort of invader is highly outdated. Never mind the idea of outright extermination/supplantation of cultures which existed chronologically earlier in the area in question. Even if the prevailing culture markedly changes and coincides with the arrival of new groups in an area, doesn’t mean that they either a.) Invaded in a modern, militaristic sense b.) Even if they did, actively suppressed members of the native culture or c.) completely replaced the people present. That’s not to say that something like that isn’t possible, just that it shouldn’t be anyones go-to theory for archaological research.
So in Artors example in #20 there is no reason to assume, that cheddar mans descendants were at any point wiped out or replaced by members of these subsequent dominant cultures. It’s far more likely that they’d have become part of the new cultural paradigm by a process of integration and adaptation and intermarried with the (in most cases probably far less numerous, see e.g. the Saxons and Normans) newcomers.
@yknot #29 Where did you hear that? I’ve certainly never heard of it and I was born and raised in the actual Emmen valley, better known as the eponymous Emmental. It would also be rather weird, since the vast majority of Swiss cheeses doesn’t have any holes, so it’d seem a bit backward to invent such a term for the norm.
@mutzlimaa #33 I got it from Wikipedia, which cites this article:
http://www.thenibble.com/reviews/main/cheese/cheese2/glossary10.asp
“The cheese industry calls these holes or tunnels “eyes.” Swiss cheese without eyes is known as “blind.” ”
Although I now notice that the Wikipedia article included this parenthetical remark:
“(The term is applied to cheeses of this style made outside Switzerland, such as Jarlsberg cheese, which originates in Norway)”
That might explain why you hadn’t heard it before. I may have attributed the cheesy pun to the wrong cheesemakers.
But it’s still a wonderfully cheesy pun.
just goes to show yah that people are not pure in any meaningful way, and if things happened in the past like they happen today there a was a lot of sex going on between people where ever people happened to find themselves
uncle frogy
Elon Musk will always be a better Prophet than you will ever be, PZ Myers.