It’s been a lot of cheddar the past few weeks. Or should I say Cheddar Man, the 9,150 year old Mesolithic subfossil from the area of Cheddar Gorge in England. This individual is important because it’s the oldest remain of such high quality found in Great Britain. And, in the late 1990s, as reported in Bryan Sykes’ Seven Daughters of Eve and elsewhere, the Cheddar Man subfossil was genotyped for mtDNA, the maternal lineage. There were, and are, lots of controversies about the validity of that result due to contamination being common in those early years of ancient genetics.
But today we have Cheddar Man’s whole genome. The preprint is finally out, and I’m digesting. Additionally, there has been a Channel 4 documentary, and a few weeks of media hype all around the implications of Cheddar Man.
This is an exciting time for genetics, history, and heritage. Since Britain is a major center of interest for these topics, it’s not surprising that Cheddar-mania has taken off. To mark this occasion DNA Geeks commissioned a design of Cheddar Man using Prince as a model. That might seem strange, but it probably is appropriate given Cheddar Man’s other-worldly and ambiguous appearance. You can get t-shirts and framed prints.
I’ll probably be posting about the Cheddar Man preprint, which really transcends Cheddar himself, tonight or tomorrow.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing to celebrate here. Cheddar man is being used as fuel to the propaganda machine.
And honestly, he doesn’t bring much to the table at this point, he’s just another WHG.
What happened to comms on Cheddar Man preprint?