Cheddar Man

And he's like, "Oh, if you look on this right-wing forum, there's people saying racist things." Surprise, surprise.

"And that's why we as archeologists cannot allow people to identify with their ancestors." One year later, less than a year later, he is a named author on the study of Cheddar Man, and he has been, um, the, the, you know...

The, in the Cheddar Man, in the study, they've got, like, phenotype predictions of different Western hunter-gatherers.

I've gone on about this in so many interviews and so many videos before, but I don't wanna go over it too much.

But my analysis of it is complete and definitive within the book, so read that.

We don't really know how the different genes that are in the, in the population at that time affected people then.

And also, there are other genes that weren't really concentrated on.

But we know that some of the genes associated with dec- deep, deep, like, light, very light skin in modern Europeans today were absent in WHG, and that led the, the, the software, hieraSplex, that was used for prediction models to say that some of them, some of these samples, most notably Cheddar Man from England, were quite dark.

And so just in case you want a handy list and to be reminded, I'll talk about a few of them.

The book that really kicked me off and made me want to try and make sense of British history is is a wonderful book called Great Tales from English History, Cheddar Man to DNA, a treasury of true stories of the extraordinary people who made Great Britain.

And that is written by Robert Lacey.

Originally, it was in two volumes and it was originally written for kids, I think.

There's the Britonic people, right, that have been here since the recession of the ice sheets.

That's Cheddar Man.

And Cheddar Man's ancestor lives right around the corner.

We have all, as English people, British people, right? We have elements of Anglo-Saxon DNA.

Some have bits of Viking, not through their ancestors' decision.

Like, it just really, you know, like, you know.

Everyone knows, uh, Cheddar Man was a brother.

Uh, I'm pretty sure that King Arthur, he was probably, uh, Chinese.

So, uh, really, uh, you have no leg to stand on.

They were amazed.

to find out that Cheddar Man, the oldest Brit, was actually black with dark curly hair and blue eyes.

So 10,000 years ago, the people who populated Britain were Africans.

It was actually announced together by the National History Museum and the University College of London, where they announced it proudly that the first Brit was a black man.

We have Britonic DNA.

Cheddar Man's ancestor lives right around the corner.

And funnily enough, he's not black.

So the idea that we are a nation of immigrants does not hold water.

Fantastic.

Um, and it's also where Cheddar Man was discovered.

Do you know about Cheddar Man?

Ah, okay.

So he's like the oldest guy, isn't he?

Oldest complete skeleton found in the UK, I believe.

Okay.

So Cheddar Man had been discovered in this cave in the early 1900s, so a couple of decades before these workers have arrived that we started with.

So I started saying indigenous, Yeah.

Now, the reason why I say indigenous is because although I see a lot of black people holding on to the cheddar man and all that, I don't hold on to them people because they ain't done nothing for black people.

They lived here, but they didn't preserve blackness.

None of that.

What I'm saying is in Britain, the culture that you're living through in Britain was shaped by white people, fam.

Man's get so vexed when I say that.

Cheddar Man didn't shake no culture.

They didn't shake.

those relationships produce children, which means tens of thousands of years later, Neanderthals are still here in a very real biological sense.

You might recall the Cheddar Man story.

In the early 1990s, a group of scientists began researching the idea that Neanderthals didn't just disappear, they were absorbed by us, modern humans, Homo sapiens.

Cheddar Man was discovered in Cheddar.

He was roughly about 10,000 years old.

It's a skeleton of a Mesolithic man.

And he had traces of Neanderthal in his DNA.

Just a side note, there are so many stories that we talk about where if two months, six months, a year later, you said to me, where did that story take place? I'd go, I don't know.