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. Cheddar Gorge is the largest gorge in the United Kingdom Cheddar Gorge is the largest gorge in the United Kingdom, near the village of Cheddar in the Mendip Hills in Somerset, England. ... Somerset is a county in the south-west of England. ... Royal motto (French): Dieu et mon droit (Translated: God and my right) Englands location (dark green) within the British Isles Languages English (de facto) Capital London de facto Largest city London Area – Total Ranked 1st UK 130,395 km² Population – Total (mid-2004) – Total (2001 Census) – Density Ranked 1st... (9th millennium BC – 8th millennium BC – 7th millennium BC – other millennia) // Events The south area of Çatalhöyük. ... Cannibalism in Brazil in 1557 as described by Hans Staden. ...

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. The Natural History Museum from the south east The Natural History Museum, one of three large museums on Exhibition Road, Kensington, London (the others are the Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum), is home to life and earth science collections comprising some 70 million items. ... Cheddar Village circa 1907 Cheddar is a village in the district of Sedgemoor in Somerset, England, situated on the edge of the Mendip Hills nine miles north west of Wells. ...

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. The 1990s decade refers to the years from 1990 to 1999, inclusive. ... Bryan Sykes is professor of human genetics at the University of Oxford. ... The University of Oxford, located in the city of Oxford in England, is the oldest university in the English-speaking world. ... Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA, or less popularly, mDNA) is DNA that is located in mitochondria. ... A molar is the fourth kind of tooth in mammals. ... In human genetics, Haplogroup U is a human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroup. ...

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

• Source for the DNA study
• Cheddar Man