Horrible Histories Claims Cheddar Man Was Black Attacked

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.

Beeb’s ‘Horrible Histories’ Pushing Myths and Falsehoods as Black History

One of the major aims of the ‘History Debunked’ YouTube channel is attacking the myths and sometimes deliberate lies, which try to present past British society as far more ethnically diverse and multiracial than it really was. This is being done in order to create an image of the past that fits and reflects today’s racially diverse society. Although undoubtedly well meant, it is a fabrication. Simon Webb, the YouTuber behind the channel, is a Telegraph-reading Conservative, but I don’t think he can be fairly accused of racism. He’s a published author, who does know his history and the reality behind the falsehoods he tries to debunk.

On Tuesday he put up a video attacking the latest editions of the Beeb’s Horrible Histories programme. This is a children’s history programme based on a series of best selling books. This is intended to present history in a fun way with much comedy, though Webb, with rather more serious tastes, decries it as slap-dash and inaccurate. A recent edition of the programme was on Black British history, and was simply full of myths and falsehoods presented as solid, historical fact. So much so, that Webb said he couldn’t go through all of them, and described the programme as propaganda aimed at children. So he confined himself with a couple of the more egregious.

The programme began with the Empire Windrush and the statement that its passengers had been invited to England to help with reconstruction after the War. This is a myth that’s been promoted by a number of people, including Diane Abbott. The truth is that Blacks weren’t invited to Britain by anyone and definitely not the British government. They were appalled at the immigrants’ arrival because they didn’t have anywhere to accommodate them. Webb states that some ended up living in air raid shelters because of the lack of proper housing. The truth is that the Empire Windrush was a troop ship that was returning to Britain from South America. There was hardly anyone on board, so the captain decided to open it up to paying passengers to reduce costs. The adverts for places aboard the ship in the Jamaican Daily Gleaner simply gives the prices of the various classes of accommodation. There is no mention of work in Britain. As for the motives of the people, who took passage aboard the ship, the Sheffield Daily News in Britain reported the comments of a Jamaican businessman, Floyd Rainer, who said that the immigrants had come to Britain because they were dissatisfied with pay and conditions in the Caribbean. They were seeking better opportunities for themselves, not to help Britain.

The programme then followed this with an item about Black Roman soldiers at Hadrian’s Wall. These were Moors from the Roman province of Mauretania. However, Mauretania was in North Africa, in what is now Morocco and Algeria. It was a province settled by Carthaginians, who were Phoenicians from what is now Lebanon, and the Berbers. Although comparatively dark-skinned, they had Mediterranean complexions, and were not Blacks from the modern West African country of Mauretania, has an American website claims.

It then went on to St. Adrian of Canterbury, who it was claimed was also Black. But he came from what is now Libya in north Africa, and so wouldn’t have been a Black African. However, the programme stated that he was an African, and left the viewer to imagine that he would therefore have been Black.

Mary Seacole was also shown tending British soldiers in a hospital during the Crimean War, which is also a myth. She set up a bar and restaurant and never did any actual nursing. It also showed Cheddar Man as Black. This is based on a reconstruction that was widely covered in the press at the time. However, Webb has done a previous video about it and similar reconstructions showing how flawed they are. In the case of Cheddar Man, the scientists behind the announcement that he was Black actually retracted this in a piece published in New Scientist. No-one really knows what colour people’s skins were 10,000 years ago.

I think the BBC actually means well with all this, and its presenters and compilers probably don’t think that they’re falsifying history. I’m sure they genuinely believe that they’re uncovering previously hidden aspects of the British past. I think projecting the presence of Black people back into the past is part of an attempt to deal with the continuing racist attitude towards Black and Asian Brits that still sees them as foreign, even though they have now been here for three generations. And a smaller number will have been here for much longer.

But I also think that the Beeb is also prepared to falsify history in this direction as well simply to make a programme. Back around 2003/4 the Beeb screened a series about the way modern artists and musicians were taking inspiration from the Psalms of the Bible. In one edition, feminist icon Germaine Greer went to Jamaica to meet the Rastafarian musicians, who sang the Psalms in the origin Amharic, according to the Radio Times.

Historically, this is nonsense. The Psalms were originally written, like almost all of the Tanakh, the Christian Old Testament, in Hebrew. Hence its alternative name of Hebrew Bible. It very definitely wasn’t written in Amharic, which is the modern Ethiopian language of the Amhara people. But Rastafarianism is based on the worship of Haile Selassie, the late emperor of Ethiopia, as the Lion of Judah and Black messiah. Hence, presumably, the insistence that the Psalms were written in Amharic. It seems to me that the Beeb obtained the cooperation of the Rastafarian musos for the programme on the understanding that the programme would be presented from their theological point of view. If they contradicted the assertion that the Psalms were written in Amharic, a language that didn’t exist when the Psalms were actually composed, then no programme. And so the Beeb and the Radio Times published this piece of historical nonsense.

I think a similar process may also be working behind the Horrible Histories and similar programmes present long held myths as facts about the Black past. I don’t know, but I think some of them might be made in collaboration with Black groups and individuals, who passionately believe these falsehood. The Beeb wants to make these programmes and include the views of Blacks themselves. These individuals insist on the inclusion of these myths, which the Beeb won’t challenge because its researchers don’t know that their myths, and the organisation is afraid of these organisations denouncing them as racists if they ignore these long-held Black views.

There are some excellent books and materials on Black British history out there. Three I’ve come across are Gretchen Herzen’s Black England – Life Before Emancipation, the collection Under the Imperial Carpet – Essays in Black History, edited by Rainer Lotz and Ian Pegg, and Our Children Free and Happy – Letters from Black Settlers in Africa, edited by Christopher Fyfe and published by Edinburgh University press. But there is an awful lot of myth and falsehoods as well.

However well meant, these need to be rejected as falsehoods, even if they’re told as truth by the Beeb.