The spectre of Cheddar’s oldest known inhabitant rose again last week in piece of controversy over the Beeb’s Horrible Histories children’s programme. This had included him as part of a segment claiming that Black people had always been part of British history. This has been widely attacked, particularly by one YouTuber who put up an entire video rebutting the programme on his ‘Survive the Jive’ channel. He then appeared with another historian on the New Culture Forum’s ‘Deprogrammed’ series on their channel.
Cheddar man was a late Palaeolithic skeleton found in the Somerset village of that name in 1903. The Concise Encyclopaedia of Archaeology, edited by Leonard Cottrell, and published in 1960, says this in its entry about him:
‘The complete skeleton of Cheddar Man is to be seen in the Cheddar Gorge in England. It is mounted to stand upright in a small museum at the entrance to Gough’s Cave.
The cave has been known since 1877. In 1903 the skeleton was found, together with flint implements and an antler baton-de-commandement, a tool now thought to be a shaft-straightener. Further excavations in 1927 produced some hundreds more flint tools, another shaft-straightener, bone awls, part of an ivory rod, and perforated shells and teeth that could have been threaded as necklaces. Some other human remains also came to light.
The caves in the sides of the Cheddar Gorge were hollowed out in the soft limestone by water. Several of them were inhabited by bands of humans towards the end of the Palaeolithic period. The population of Britain at the time was Homo Sapiens, and tools found with skeletons show that there was close cultural contact with France. The English Channel was not then formed, and once the British ice that corresponded to the Wurm glaciataion had retreated, it was possible for Upper Palaeolithic cultures to develop in Britain.
In Gough’s Cave, the flint tools were of the types associated with the Creswellian culture, as is shown by the small battered-back blades used as knives. This is a pale reflection of the splendid French Aurignacian of the Upper Palaeolithic.
Magdalenian influence is shown by the presence of the shaft-straighteners.
The bones of Cheddar Man were found near the entrance of the cave, for, with little means of artificial light at his disposal, Palaeolithic man was forced to live within the range of daylight. The spot where they were dug up is to be seen on the left-hand side in a grotto below the present ground level.’ (p. 130).
A few years ago a group of three scientists used DNA sequencing and forensic anthropology to reconstruct Cheddar Man’s face and complexion. This was a major advance at the time showing that surviving DNA from such ancient remains could be used to reconstruct the person’s original appearance. This caused astonishment, as from this it appeared that Cheddar Man was dark skinned, albeit with blue eyes. Scientists were amazed that Britons had retained a dark complexion at this late stage of human prehistory. Various anti-racist commenters stated that it gave a space for a Black presence in Britishness. And this is where it becomes controversial.
Firstly, one of the scientists involved retracted the reconstruction and claimed it was impossible to know from the DNA what the skeleton’s original complexion was. This was printed in New Scientist. The panel on ‘Deprogrammed’ did not mention this, but stated that the reconstruction was also matched and influenced by similar reconstructions from the Netherlands and elsewhere. also pointed out that the absence of White DNA does not automatically mean that Cheddar Man had dark skin. East Asians don’t have the same genes for pale skin as Europeans, but nevertheless the peoples of many of these countries have them because they have a different set of genes that do this. And the depth of Cheddar Man’s dark colouring seems to have been influenced by one of the scientists’ own pro-EU and anti-racist beliefs. It seems that there was a range of possibilities how dark this individual was. But this scientist, according to the Forum and its guests, deliberately made him as dark as possible, saying something about attacking Brexit and ‘white supremacy’. And when the reconstruction was photographed, it was deliberately made even darker.
Horrible Histories conflated a dark complexion with explicitly African ancestry. They stated that he was Black, which has a very specific definition in British law. It refers to people of specifically African ancestry, and excludes others, who may be similarly dark-skinned, such as the Tamils from southern India. And all the modern Blacks whose images appeared at the end of the Horrible Histories segment were all of West Indian and Black African ancestry. This, the Deprogrammed panel considered, was deliberately misleading, as it gave the impression that people of specifically African ancestry were present that far back in the Stone Age. They also considered it problematic because in trying to show that the peoples of the British Isles were or included Black people originally, it conceded ground to their opponents in viewing historical priority as a crucial, defining factor in Britishness. In fact, they said, there was nothing wrong in later, recent immigrants being regarded as British without projecting that presence far back into history.
There was much more in the discussion, which stated that the dark-skinned Palaeolithic peoples then gave way themselves to an influx of further, light-skinned people from the Ukraine, and 90 per cent of the Palaeolithic population was replaced within a space of two centuries. They found this difficult to imagine without ‘something terrible’ happening. By which they mean some kind of genocide or war of extermination. They commented on the irony that the new, 21st century scientific techniques were bringing back 19th century models. Which meant the Diffusionist ideas of 19th century archaeologists and anthropologists. These considered that human prehistory had seen a series of invasions and colonisations as one group of early settlers came and conquered its predecessors before being supplanted by later arrivals in its turn. This idea was later rejected in the 20th century by the idea that the underlying populations did not change over time, but simply adopted new cultural trends. The ancient Brits who became the Beaker people were still genetically the people they had always been. It’s just that they accepted the package of Beaker culture that had reached Britain from Spain and north Africa. Now it seems this view is being challenged by DNA information showing that mass invasions and population replacement really had taken place.
I realise this came from the right-wing New Culture Forum, but it seems solid science to me. I don’t think there’s much controversy over the assertion that the very first Homo Sapiens colonists of Europe were dark-skinned. This occurred around 50,000 or so years ago, and I can remember reading decades ago that skeletons from this remote epoch were like those of Aboriginal Australians. At this period, European humans were more archaic and robust in their appearance, with pronounced brow ridges, than their fellows in Africa, who were much more gracile. But it does seem, if the NCF and its guests are to be believed, that liberal, anti-racist ideology had played a part in creating a possibly misleading reconstruction of Cheddar Man’s appearance and the Beeb had also been misleading in claiming that Cheddar Man had been Black.
Since the Second World War western archaeologists have been very keen to avoid nationalist ideologies influencing the reconstruction of the past, including the reconstruction of ancient humans from elsewhere in the world with European features. Early reconstructions of the Scythian skeletons from the Pazryk region of Siberia were originally given Caucasian features by the Russian forensic anthropologists who originally reconstructed them. But later examination and reconstruction has shown that they had, as might be expected, east Asian features.
Now it seems that the racial bias has swung the other way so that scientists feel constrained to reconstruct ancient Europeans as dark as possible without considering this ideologically driven or racially biased.
Regardless of the racial issues involved, Cheddar Man is fascinating. Some of the other human remains that were found show signs of cannibalism. And the scientists who reconstructed his DNA also compared it with people in the village to see if he had any modern descendants. It turned out he did: the headmaster of the local school. His mother, however, strongly objected, wondering what people would think. And the people of the Palaeolithic have contributed to the appearance of modern Brits. Supposedly the genes for blue eyes come from them.
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