Cheddar is a village in Somerset, England. It’s known for
limestone quarries, strawberry fields, and of course, cheese. People have been
living here for thousands of years. Britain’s oldest complete skeleton, the
Cheddar man, was found here in 1903. Scientists recently extracted DNA from one
of Cheddar man’s teeth, and compared its mitochondrial DNA – inherited
unchanged on the maternal line -- with samples of mitochondrial DNA from students
at a local school. They also compared it with samples donated by members of Cheddar’s
oldest families. They came up with a match; not with the students or neighbors,
but with one of the school teachers, Adrian Targett. The results don’t prove or
disprove much: not that folks in Cheddar were hunter-gatherers or farmers 9,000
years ago, nor that Mr. Targett descended from the stone-age fossil. It only
proves he and Cheddar man have a common female ancestor. Still, how cool is
that?
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