4.7 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 28 February 2021
⏱️ 26 minutes
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Cheddar Man is the oldest almost complete skeleton of a Homo sapien ever found in Britain and, for this fantastic episode, Tristan spoke to the scientist who has drilled a (very small) hole in him. Dr Selina Brace is a biologist who works with ancient and degraded DNA. At the Natural History Museum in London, where Cheddar Man currently resides, Selina and her team have been able to examine this iconic skeleton’s genetic makeup and deduce from it more information about the evolution of our species, as well as the lifestyles and even appearances of Homo sapiens moving from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic era.
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0:00.0 | It's the ancients on History Hit, I'm Tristan Hughes your host and in today's podcast |
0:08.7 | we've got the fantastic Dr. Salina brace on the show. Salina is an ancient DNA specialist |
0:15.7 | working at the Natural History Museum. It was Salina who drilled into the skull of that |
0:21.8 | remarkable iconic mesolithic skeleton, Cheddar Man. Now it was great to get Salina on the |
0:28.0 | show to talk about her work on Cheddar Man, what they were trying to uncover through this work, |
0:32.8 | and what it is teaching us about one of the biggest shifts in human history, the shift between |
0:39.3 | the mesolithic and the neolithic, the shift from hunter-gatherers to farming societies. This was an |
0:46.3 | amazing chat, you're going to absolutely love it. Here's Salina. |
0:50.9 | Salina, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's my pleasure. Now we're talking about you and |
1:02.5 | your team's incredible work on an iconic skeleton, Cheddar Man, who has this extraordinary history. |
1:09.8 | Yeah, Cheddar Man is an amazing story. He is Britain's oldest, most complete skeleton. |
1:16.7 | He currently resides on display at the Natural History Museum in London, but his story begins, |
1:22.8 | or he first came to light, should we say, in the late Victorian era in Somerset, and a set of caves |
1:29.7 | called Goff's caves, which are near the village of Cheddar. These caves at the time were managed by a |
1:37.5 | retired sea captain, captain Richard Cox Goff, fabulous name, and he turned these caves into |
1:46.4 | Victorian show caves. So it was a tourist attraction, and people would come to the caves and |
1:51.7 | look at the stalactites and stalagmites. It was all the rage in the Victorian era. It's like it |
1:57.2 | is today, actually. But in December 1903, there were some workmen, and they were digging a drainage |
2:05.9 | ditch in these cave areas, because they were actually quite prone to flooding. And when they were |
2:11.2 | pulling out the soil and the sediment, they found in there these remains, these remains of an |
2:16.9 | almost complete skeleton of a young man. It caused quite the media storm at the time, because these |
2:23.4 | were obviously really, really old bones, and people were already suggesting perhaps this was |
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