The village of Cheddar, in the picturesque hills of Somerset in southwest England, is noted, of course, for its cheese; for the caves at Cheddar Gorge; and for Adrian Targett, a history teacher at Kings of Wessex Community School. Targett found out last March that he is related to 9,000-year-old Cheddar Man, the most complete ancient skeleton ever found in Britain.
A local tv company working on a documentary about the historic area had contacted Bryan Sykes, a geneticist at Oxford, to see if he could extract any dna from Cheddar Man. Sykes was interested in comparing the genes of modern Britons to the preagricultural hunter-gatherers of Cheddar Man’s time, so the project suited him perfectly. The producers then asked Targett to find local students willing to be part of the sample modern population. To show his students that the method of dna sampling, a cheek swab, was painless, Targett ...
