Blood of the Isles Read Free Page A

much the same DNA as people living today, that would strengthen our side of the argument.
    The fact that the Cheddar tooth DNA was identical to modern Europeans’ had several ramifications. This was the DNA of a man who, without any doubt, was a hunter-gatherer who had lived at least 6,000 years before farming reached the Isles. Taken with all the other genetic evidence, the result helped to swing opinion towards a predominantly hunter-gatherer ancestry for Europeans and away from the prevalent theory of a great wave of ancient farmers sweeping out from the Middle East and overwhelming the thinly spread hunters. The heat has gone out of that particular debate by now, and I think it is fair to say that most people today think that the impact of migrating farmers on the genetic make-up of Europe was far less than previously thought.
    A few months after finding the DNA from the 12,000-year-old Cheddar tooth I got permission to repeat the process with a younger specimen from the same cave. This was the famous ‘Cheddar Man’. His remains had been excavated in 1903 and, like the other skeleton, had been stored in the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. They had been carbon-dated to about 9,000 years ago, still well before the arrival of farming in Britainand so still relevant to the hunter/farmer debate. Sure enough, after drilling out the tooth and analysing the DNA from the dentine powder, I could see that Cheddar Man’s DNA was also thoroughly modern. It was not the same, in detail, as the earlier Cheddar tooth, but it did match quite a few modern Britons’, one of whom lived just down the road from the Caves. A local television company had got wind of our work on the Cheddar fossils and, between us, we had dreamed up a format whereby, in parallel to the work on Cheddar Man’s teeth, we would also test the DNA of the pupils at the local school. If we could find a DNA match between Cheddar Man and a modern-day nearby resident it would be a good local-interest story as well as a neat demonstration of genetic continuity.
    With all the DNA results in from the school, and from Cheddar Man himself, the producer arranged a notorious ‘reveal’ session. The pupils, all aged between sixteen and eighteen, and the master who had organized the event at the school, gathered in the hall, nervously waiting for the results to be announced. The camera passed across the faces of the teenagers, each one apprehensive that it might be their DNA that had been matched to Cheddar Man. The presenter spoke, the match was revealed and the cameras swivelled round to bring one face into tight close-up. It was not one of the pupils at all, but the history teacher who had made the arrangements – Mr Adrian Targett. Gasps all round, a blushing teacher and a score of ever so slightly disappointed teenagers.
    The following day Adrian Targett’s smiling face was on the front page of every national newspaper. Hewas pictured crouching next to the replica of Cheddar Man’s skeleton at the spot in the cave where it had been discovered in 1903. Even the tabloids carried the story, impressively assembling a topless model in a skimpy rabbit-skin loincloth and with a hastily assembled flint axe. Adrian told me later that he had been offered a ‘five-figure sum’ to appear in a loincloth but had, sensibly, declined. The following day the story was picked up by newspapers abroad. It proved to be particularly popular in the US, probably because it fitted in nicely with the image of a bucolic English countryside in which it takes 9,000 years for someone’s descendants to move 300 yards down the road. People still remember the story even now, and when I was lecturing in California last year I was introduced by the organizers as the man who got DNA from the Cheese Man.
    The Cheddar Men, though they lived a very long time ago, were not the first human inhabitants of the Isles. There are scattered shreds of evidence that the Isles were once occupied by