Do you know? Mesolithic ‘Cheddar Man’ Shares DNA with English History Teacher!
The Fascinating DNA Link Between Cheddar Man and a Present-Day History Teacher
According to the Guinness Book of world records, Adrian Targett, a teacher from Cheddar, Somerset, UK, holds the distinction of being the farthest traced descendant by DNA. Across approximately 300 generations, he has been established as a direct maternal descendant of Cheddar Man, a 9,000-year-old skeleton, which remains one of the most ancient and complete skeletons ever discovered in Great Britain.
Targett’s DNA was matched to that of Cheddar Man through a process called mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) testing.
mtDNA is passed down from mothers to their children, so Targett’s mtDNA would have been identical to that of his mother, her mother, and so on, all the way back to Cheddar Man’s mother.
The discovery that Targett is a descendant of Cheddar Man was made possible by advances in DNA technology. In the past, it was only possible to trace ancestry back a few hundred years. But with the development of mtDNA testing, it is now possible to trace ancestry back thousands of years.
Targett’s discovery has shed new light on the history of human migration. Cheddar Man lived in a time when…
