Chedder Man and the Flood

Chedder Man Skull

The so-called Cheddar Man is the skeleton of a male human (Homo sapiens) living around 10,150-10,565 years ago, and discovered in 1903 in Gough’s Cave, Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, England.¹ The remains are now kept in the Human Evolution gallery of the Natural History Museum, London. It appears that he died a violent death in his early twenties. The skull also has a large crater-like lesion just above the skull’s right orbit, suggesting that the he may have been suffering from an infection in the frontal sinus.

Nuclear DNA analysis suggests that Cheddar Man had blue-green eyes, dark brown or black hair, and dark or dark-to-black skin. He appears to have been a typical of the Western European hunter-gatherer population at the time.²

The analysis of Cheddar Man’s mitochondrial DNA by Bryan Sykes in 1996 found that he belonged to the mtDNA haplogroup U5, which he shared in common with Adrian Targett, a history teacher from a local Somerset school. That result indicated that Targett was descended from the same ancestral group as Cheddar Man’s mother. Although mtDNA haplogroup U5 is fairly common in Europe, with an overall occurrence of around 11%, Sykes data still suggest a connection between someone in England 10,000 years ago and someone living there today. This in spite of the proposal that the Flood wiped out everyone in the British Isles in 2348 BC.

On the other hand, mtDNA haplogroup U5 is uncommon in the Middle East, occurring at small frequencies, suggesting that the haplogroup there resulted from migration to the Middle East from Europe. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that haplogroup U5 came to England from any descendants of Noah’s wife or daughters-in-law. Therefore, haplogroup U5 continued in the UK for 10,000 years in spite of a proposed global Flood.

References

1.     Meiklejohn, C., Radiocarbon Dating Of Mesolithic Human remains in Great Britain, Mesolithic Miscellany, 21:20–58, 2011

2.     Brace, Selina, et al., Ancient genomes indicate population replacement in Early Neolithic Britain, Nature Ecology & Evolution, 3:765–771, 2019

3.     Barham, Larry, Philip Priestley, and Adrian Targett, In Search of Cheddar Man, The History Press Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK, 1999