Thanks to Cheddar Man, I feel more comfortable as a brown Briton | Aarathi Prasad

I grew up being told that a prerequisite for our national identity was white skin - that prejudice has been proved false

The results of 10,000-year old Cheddar Man's DNA analysis have hit the headlines in the past few days, accompanied by a striking portrait that needed no words. Here was this bona fide European - indeed, an ancestral Brit - and the man was black. Genetic analysis suggests he had blue eyes, and that his skin was probably darker, even, than the portrait shows. Three hundred generations later, allowing for a little variation between individuals, about 10% of the genome of many white British people alive today comes from this man's dark-skinned population.

Contrary to some comments made on the story, Cheddar Man was no anomaly - no lost, tanned tourist to the British Isles. Rather, he was of a group known as the western hunter-gatherers, who migrated into Europe at the end of the last ice age, like other ancestral Europeans found in Spain, Hungary and Luxembourg. As with our British ancestor from Cheddar, their DNA has also been analysed, and the results show that these Europeans, too, had the same dark skin.