Cheddar Man
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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 BCE, and it appears that he died a violent death, perhaps related to the cannibalism practised in the area. 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 Scandinavia and Britain. 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) lends credence to the theory that modern-day Britons mainly are not descended from Middle-Eastern migratory farmers, but rather the hunter-gatherer tribes who came first.
External links
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