The first ancient Briton
Black skin, blue eyes and curly hair. DNA tests reveal extraordinary face of ...
CUTTING-EDGE tests on the country’s oldest skeleton have revealed the first ancient Britons had black skin, dark curly hair and blue eyes.
The ‘extraordinary’ findings came to light after DNA tests were carried out for the first time on the bones of ‘Cheddar Man’, who died 10,000 years ago.
His bones make up the oldest near-complete human skeleton ever found in Britain.
Scientists said yesterday they were surprised to discover that the earliest Briton would be considered black if he lived today.
The research suggests the first inhabitants of the British Isles developed white skin later than previously thought.
Cheddar Man’s bones caused a sensation when they were unearthed in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, in 1903.
Experts from the Natural History Museum and University College London have now done genetic tests on the remains by drilling into a bone in the skull and sequencing the DNA inside.
The museum and Channel 4 yesterday unveiled a reconstruction of the skeleton, ahead of a documentary called The First Brit: Secrets of the 10,000 Year Old Man, which will air later this month. The programme reveals there is a 76 per cent chance that Cheddar Man was ‘dark to black’, which Dr Tom Booth, a scientist from the museum, said was ‘extraordinary’.
He said in the documentary: ‘If a human with that colour skin wandered around town now, we’d call him black, I suppose. That’s incredible.’ He added: ‘It really shows up that these imaginary racial categories that we have are really very modern constructions, or very recent constructions that are really not applicable to the past at all.’
Professor Ian Barnes, a geneticist who worked on the investigation, said the skin tone was ‘a lot darker than we’d expect for Europe’, adding: ‘I assume that’s going to be a big surprise to most members of the public. It was certainly quite a big surprise to me.’
At a screening of the documentary, he added: ‘For me, it’s not just the skin colour that’s interesting, it’s that combination of features that make him look not like anyone that you’d see today.
‘Not just dark skin and blue eyes, because you can get that combination, but also the face shape. So all of this combines together and make him just not the same as people you see around today.’
Britain in the Mesolithic era – the Middle stone age around 8,000 BC – was a very different place from today. An Ice Age had just finished and the land had become green again. Red deer and herds of huge, wild cattle called aurochs roamed the land.
Perhaps in pursuit of game, hunter-gatherer tribes swept in from what is now continental Europe across a land bridge over the North Sea known as Dogger- land. The total human population in Britain was then just 12,000.
Although other populations had settled in Britain long before Cheddar Man arrived, they were wiped out before him and he marked the start of continuous habitation on the island.
Tests on modern Britons reveal we have around 10 per cent of our DNA in common with him. Close genetic matches to Cheddar Man have been found in remains in Europe, including in Spain, Hungary and Luxembourg. Scientists say his ancestors arrived in the Britain via the Middle East, after travelling from Africa.
Professor Barnes and Dr Selina Brace extracted DNA data from bone powder after drilling a 2mm hole through the skull’s inner ear bone. They scanned the skull and a 3D model was produced by ‘paleo artists’ Alfons and Adrie Kennis, Dutch twin brothers who make life-like reconstructions of extinct mammals and early humans, usually Neanderthals. They spent three months creating the model of Cheddar Man.
Alfons Kennis said: ‘It’s really nice to make a more graceful man, not a heavy-browed Neanderthal. So we were very excited that it was a guy from after the Ice Age. We were very interested in what kind of human he was.
‘With the new DNA information it was really revolutionary.’
Professor Mark Thomas, of UCL, said one theory is that white skin developed in Britain and western Europe after our ancestors switched from hunting to farming. When they stopped eating as much meat, particularly liver and fish, they needed another source of vitamin D and having fairer skin allowed them to absorb sunlight, another source of the nutrient.
Alfons Kennis added: ‘People define themselves by which country they’re from, and they assume that their ancestors were just like them. And then suddenly new research shows that we used to be a totally different people with a different genetic make-up.
‘People will be surprised, and maybe it will make immigrants feel a bit more involved in the story. And maybe it gets rid of the idea that you have to look a certain way to be from somewhere. We are all immigrants.’
The First Brit: Secrets of the 10,000 Year Old Man airs on Channel 4 on February 18.
‘A big surprise to the public’