‘Oldest Briton’ had dark skin, blue eyes

New research suggests ancient Britons had darkbrown or black skin, dark wavy hair and blue eyes.

The surprising details emerged from a project involving specialists from London’s Natural History Museum and University College London who extracted DNA from a 10,000-year-old skeleton that was found in 1903 and named Cheddar Man.

Professor Chris Stringer, the museum’s lead researcher into human origins, was delighted with the findings.

“I’ve been studying the skeleton of Cheddar Man for about 40 years,” he 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.”

It is the first time the remains of a prehistoric Briton have been analyzed in such detail.

The researchers used the results from their genome analysis, combined with physical measurements from scans of the skull, to advise Dutch artists and model-makers Turns out he was dark-skinned and blue-eyed Alfons and Adrie Kennis as they built a lifelike three-dimensional reconstruction of the man’s face and head.

“It’s really nice to make a more graceful man, not a heavy-browed Neanderthal,” Alfons told the Evening Standard.

The project will be described in detail in a documentary made by British television company Channel 4.

Steven Clarke, director of the documentary, acknowledged that the man’s skin color was likely to generate a lot of interest.

“I think we all know we live in times where we are unusually preoccupied with skin pigmentation,” the BBC quoted him as saying.

The skeleton that gave up the secrets was discovered 115 years ago in a cave in Somerset, Southwest England.

He lived during the Mesolithic period, or Middle Stone Age, and was 1.66 meters tall. He died in his early 20s, possibly as the result of a head injury.

Experts believe pale skin arrived in Britain from the Middle East around 6,000 years ago.

Yoan Diekmann, a computational biologist at UCL who was part of the research team, told the Guardian the connection often drawn between Britishness and whiteness was “not an immutable truth. It has always changed, and will change”.