taking our country black
By Elizabeth
@Poppylicious (11134)
United Kingdom
February 8, 2018 1:15am CST
He said that, on a Facebook status update thingy, my {mixed-race} brother-in-law. It did rather make me giggle.
Cheddar Man is the oldest man in the UK. Or just in England? I know not. Anywhichway, at the tender age of 10,000 years, he's lacking organs, skin, a brain ... you know, all those things which make him a valuable member of society. His name is a bit dubious too, given that he's simply named after the area in which he was discovered. Better than Jeremy or Barnabus, perhaps.
What Cheddar Man lacks in some areas, he certainly makes up for in others, namely his DNA. At this point in my ramblings I have a sudden desire to swear, loudly. Fudge me!!! will have to suffice. DNA is fudging amazing! We now know that Cheddar Man {I really want to call him Alan, bizarrely} was dark-skinned, possibly black, with blue eyes. Very striking. His own ancestors were from the Middle-east, migrant hunter-gatherers, which probably explains my own tiny-weeny bit of DNA which suggests Middle-eastern connections. Maybe he's my REALLYgreat-grandad, eh? And yours too! All those who believe that white people are superior must be flabbergasted today; what? We're all just people who descended from other people?? We're just like animals who physically adapt to the climate and environment in which we find ourselves?? We're all descended from pesky migrants?? No, no, no! I imagine they cry into their pillows as they fall asleep.
Both this, and the news that spiders have an ancient cousin who had a tail, and may still exist in so-far unexplored regions of the earth, makes me realise that we know so little about the world around us. Even dinosaurs are a fairly recent discovery. What other wonders are within our grasp? What wonders will we never have knowledge of because they've disappeared for ever?
I love that the world is so full of surprises.
10 people like this
8 responses
@WorDazza (15826)
• Manchester, England
8 Feb 18
There was a very interesting piece on this on the radio the other morning regarding how we may have come to have lighter skin in the UK.
The thinking is that, as the climate became a bit cooler and less sunny, the lighter skin gene, probably coming in from Scandinavia, proliferated as light skin is more efficient for converting the sun's rays into Vitamin D.
And you hit the nail perfectly on the head when you say ultimately we're just animals, like any other animal, who have adapted over millions of years to suit the environment we have found ourselves in.
6 people like this
@WorDazza (15826)
• Manchester, England
9 Feb 18
@Poppylicious The problem for evolution is that it is very rarely taught well in schools so the vast majority of people don't fully understand it. The British evolutionary biologist Henry Gee is particularly vocal about this but unfortunately his criticisms of how evolution is taught are often quote-mined by creationist websites who imply that he is criticising evolutionary theory itself.
The classic picture of the evolution of man is one of the biggest culprits for leading to misunderstanding. It implies a linear evolution from apes to ape-like creatures then to man. Looking at that it's not surprising people don't understand why, if we came from apes, there are still apes. The truth of the matter is we share a common ancestor with modern apes rather like you share a common ancestor with your cousin only much, much further back in time!!
2 people like this
@Poppylicious (11134)
• United Kingdom
14 Feb 18
@WorDazza I don't mind the apes, it was always the fish I had a problem with.
1 person likes this
@Poppylicious (11134)
• United Kingdom
8 Feb 18
I read the Vitamin D thing too. It makes perfect sense to me. I'm still not sure that I believe in evolution in its truest sense, but I can now see what I couldn't when I was younger. We are very arrogant as a species, I definitely know that!
4 people like this
@xFiacre (14787)
• Ireland
8 Feb 18
@poppylicious If only Alan knew what he was going to spawn he might have spurned Yvonne’s advances and dampened his ardour with cold showers.
6 people like this
@Poppylicious (11134)
• United Kingdom
8 Feb 18
I don't think anyone would have been able to spurn Yvonne's advances ... I've heard the tales!
2 people like this
@xFiacre (14787)
• Ireland
8 Feb 18
@Poppylicious We’re all doomed then. Doomed, I said. Doomed.
2 people like this
@LadyDuck (502653)
• Italy
9 Feb 18
@Poppylicious How can they conclude that "we are all black" only because they have found this man is ridiculous. We do not even know for sure when the first man appeared on earth. I have read that some guess it was more than 400,000 years ago, so Cheddar Man is pretty recent and he could have been brought to England from Africa. I have known many Berbers from North Africa who have a dark skin and very light blue or green eyes. What we know is that people moved between Europe and Africa long before recorded history. This "Cheddar Man" is surely someone who came from North Africa.
1 person likes this
@Poppylicious (11134)
• United Kingdom
9 Feb 18
@LadyDuck His DNA shows that his ancestors originated in the Middle-east. They would have spread across what is now Europe. They don't say he was definitely black, they say dark-skinned, possibly black. What makes it more interesting is that it shows that way back when people did indeed move around, presumably to look around for new, more habitable, environments. So migration is not a new fangled concept and each of us is the product of tens of thousands of years of different peoples.
2 people like this
@Poppylicious (11134)
• United Kingdom
8 Feb 18
Precisely. We know so little about anything, and yet we believe we know everything!
3 people like this
@Poppylicious (11134)
• United Kingdom
8 Feb 18
Thank you for finding it interesting.
2 people like this
@spiderdust (14756)
• San Jose, California
8 Feb 18
Clearly I've missed some important news, but I did see a snippet on someone's Facebook wall that indicated that the early Britons were dark skinned? DNA and genetics are fascinating!
Also, I am alarmed about the possibility of that spider with a tail still existing.
3 people like this
@Poppylicious (11134)
• United Kingdom
8 Feb 18
Me too! I don't want one crawling up my bedroom wall in the middle of the night, its tail scratching my paintwork!
2 people like this
@YrNemo (20254)
•
13 Feb 18
hmm, I used to read these things eagerly, but when I heard that human beings were likely to evolve from chickens (a few weeks before that, it was octopus or something similar), I decided since that "enough is enough!'' (guess I refuse to be a descendant of chickens in general! 
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