With everyone on my dash freaking the heck out about the latest reconstruction of the Cheddar Friend (aka Cheddar Man)* it is a great time for a GEEK’S GUIDE TO BRITAIN: Cheddar Edition!
It is important to point out that the Cheddar Friend is called the Cheddar Friend because they come from the Cheddar Cave Complex, which DOES have to do with cheese. (Also, I call them Cheddar Friend, not Man, and everyone will have to deal with that.)
This is a complex of caves in the southwestern part of England, named for the village of Cheddar, and Cheddar Gorge. A nearby cave complex is called Wookey Hole, which is equally silly.
Cheddar cheese was invented in Cheddar, because of these caves. You make the cheese and put it in a cave to age – then, by the process of alchemy, it turns into Cheddar cheese. It is not a bad little town. You can admire Cheddar Gorge, then go into the Cheddar Caves and see the scratching of a mammoth on the wall that is one of the earliest pieces of art in England and the world, and then you can look at the cheese sitting on the racks in the cave, and then you can buy the cheese and eat it. A satisfying day for all.
The word “Cheddar” comes from an old English word “ceodar,” which Wikipedia says means “dark cavern,” but more accurately is something like “ravine” (because of the gorge.)
So it’s rather sweet because in a way, Cheddar Friend means “Cave Friend!” And while most anthropologists hate the term “caveman” because it’s misleading, it is accurate when you apply it to Cheddar Friend!
Some people are also confused by the news coverage surrounding Cheddar Friend. Why does it seem so contradictory? Was Cheddar Friend a cannibal? Were they there 10,000 years ago or 15,000 year ago or what? This confusion is because the caves have been colonised by early hominids several times over in the ancient history of England, and the news coverage has tried to explain that. The “cannibal” hominids, who lived in the cave 15,000 years ago and had cups made out of human skulls, were outliers adn should not have been in the press materials. That sort of thing just confuses the public. The skull-cup-owners were an older variant of human-adjacent being, and were not considered “modern humans.”
By contrast, Cheddar Friend, who lived in the cave 10,000 years ago, is believed to be a “modern human.” The reason they are the SUPERLATIVE CHEDDAR FRIEND is because the colonization paths of MODERN humans are very interesting. There is no evidence that Cheddar Friend or their fellows were cannibals. That is jumbling and conflating together the news coverage in an incorrect (yet predictable) way.
Anyway, if you ever visit Cheddar, you can go to the Caves and have some Feelings about them. It’s an easy day out from Bath / Bristol, and a half-hour drive from Glastonbury. (Home of the music festival, mythical resting place of King Arthur and possibly the Holy Grail, new age center of fuckery.) You could, if you were an absolute madman, fold it into a trip to Wookey Hole or Longleat. Cheddar Caves are more value for money than Wookey Hole.
* We don’t know that they were a male person. we really don’t. Bone-fondlers would like you to believe that they know this, but really human-bone-fondlers don’t know shit. Nobody can hold up a splinter of bone like they do on TV and go “hmmm hmmm yes this belonged to a 25-year-old white male ironworker with red hair who lived 3,000 years ago,” that’s just what the press releases say because it’s a series of reasonable assumptions, and the news runs with it as truth. We don’t know the exact shade of Cheddar Friend’s skin color. We can’t and we don’t and we never will. But we knew it wasn’t white, because that would have been silly, unless they were an albino, which is possible but statistically unlikely. It was foolish to pretend that they ever could have been white-skinned like a modern white person, because we KNOW that is a recent mutation and Cheddar Friend is older than that, but people pretended this anyway, because that’s what they wanted to do.
The skull-cup cannibals were modern humans; they were Magdalenians. Magdalenians were partly ancestral to Mesolithic Europeans like Cheddar Man, but 5000 years is a pretty long time- 5000 years before us, English and Sanskrit were the same language, Egypt was just unifying, and penis sheaths were the hot fashion in the Levant. Things have changed since then, and things changed between the time of the Magdalenians and Cheddar Man.
That the Magdalenians were cannibals isn’t a slander against them. Early Modern Europeans practiced medicinal cannibalism even as they decried cannibal “savages” elsewhere. Magdalenian finds are most consistent with endocannibalism, also called funerary cannibalism, where members of a social group are partly eaten when they die. It’s smart when you live on the Malthusian margin, and in their culture would have been a sign of respect for the dead. However, even if it was in the context of warfare, I will say that killing someone and then eating them isn’t that much worse than killing someone and not eating them. If Magdalenians warred, that’s not exactly a unique flaw of theirs.
But also, the Magdalenian culture* is also responsible for some of the most iconic artistic achievements of, well, all human history.
*Magdalenians were genetically homogenous, but existed over a wide range of time and space, and so probably spoke many languages and comprised many peoples, who nonetheless shared certain cultural characteristics in common.
(some of these are reproductions, as the moisture from our breath can damage paintings)(I chose a lot of bison ones because i like the bison paintings)
In France and Spain, Magdalenians had a tradition of magnificent cave art. Magdalenians weren’t the only prehistoric Europeans to make cave art; cave art in Chauvet cave is as much older than the Magdalenians as the Madgalenians are than us. But many famous caves like Lascaux are Magdalenian. Looking at their cave art literally brings me to tears. It’s so beautiful, so sensitive to aesthetic quality, to nature, and to a sort of “spiritual” sense.
The leading hypothesis is that Magdalenian art was made in the context of a shamanic spiritual framework, but since Magdalenians left no written records, we can’t know. Whatever the purpose, these paintings were meant to be viewed by lamplight in the dark of a cave, so they were made to swirl and flicker from the darkness. And so the (perhaps illusory) naturalism is sometimes abandoned, for something altogether more impressionistic and emotive.
This is to say that Magdalenians were cannibals, but they were people, and their practice of cannibalism doesn’t detract from their humanity. Also, even non-modern humans like Neanderthals, while they had simpler art and material cultures, were still people, who loved and laughed and cried and had hopes and dreams. The apparent poverty of their culture may have been due to their bands being more isolated from each other, so cultural ideas didn’t spread as well as they did in early modern humans. Even if Neanderthals were “dumb”, like, they’re people, don’t dismiss them as orcs or something.
(for what it’s worth, Magdalenians also had dark skin and black hair, but uniformly had brown eyes, unlike Mesolithic Europeans who were mostly light-eyed. No modern person has more than a small bit of Magdalenian ancestry, though through Western Eurasia it’s present. Magdalenians weren’t any race recognized now because race is a social construct and the Magdalenians lived in a different social context)
(I referred to Cheddar Man as Cheddar Man because, while determining sex from bones is famously iffy, he’s had his genome sequenced, and though it’s not published it seems that he was genetically male. Most XY people are men, so I referred to him as “Man”. That said, it is not impossible that Cheddar Man is inaccurate, since we have many cases across human prehistory of people buried with grave goods indicative of a gender that doesn’t correspond to their genetic sex. So though we can’t ask Cheddar Friend their pronouns, OP might be right and I might be wrong)
(also, Cheddar Friend/Man may have spoken a language without gendered pronouns, so even if you asked their pronouns you might not find out their gender from the answer!)
This is a very charming response and I like it a lot! Thank you!
