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"Two bees or not two bees, that is the question."
Also, surely the melting down process wouldn't harm the jewels, which could easily have been fished out of the molten gold? It all seems to bee very fishy...
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Please Note: What follows may be considered controversial. It's not my intention to cause controversy or offense, but I refuse to be intimidated into silence for the sake of 'political correctness' gone mad.
I was looking for images in Wikimedia Commons for 'Cheddar Man.' I would invite readers to see the results for themselves: Search media - Wikimedia Commons
Cheddar Man was discovered in Gough's Cave, Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, England in 1903. His skeletal remains are claimed to be between 9,000 and 10,000 years old. In February of 2018, following analysis of Cheddar Man's ancient DNA, the media was full of headlines such as "Early Briton from 10,000 years ago had dark skin and blue eyes." Very shortly after there was a documentary program broadcast on the UK's Channel 4 during which Afua Hirsch, of Ghanian and Jewish descent (a former barrister turned journalist,) made some extraordinary claims. They were also published in National Geographic:
"We do not have a sense of being an immigrant nation even though that is essentially what we are, and I think this is very useful in reminding people that we are an immigrant nation, everybody came here from somewhere and actually they’re saying that only 10% of the current British population is descended from Cheddar Man. So most British people are more recent immigrants than him and I think that that is really helpful in changing our narrative about what immigration means — there would be no British population if it weren’t for immigration and it’s hard to understand that you could be so hostile to immigration as an intrinsic principle, I think there are people in Britain who feel like that, if you understand that everyone’s ancestors were immigrants at some point. To see Cheddar Man with his dark skin it definitely provoked quite an emotional response in me, and I think that’s the power of this. It’s one thing to know that there were black people here thousands of years ago and to know that White people weren’t always White. We know there were Africans here before there were English people here, for example, and so through that that gives you a sense of the idea that there’s this indigenous British person who is White and essentially British is a fiction, it’s a narrative that was created over time, it’s not based on scientific facts so this is another feature of that really." (Afua Hirsch)
Later it became apparent that the team behind the DNA analysis actually had a range of complexions to choose between because there is no specific gene for light skin, or at least one has yet to be identified. For unknown reasons the very darkest complexion was chosen by some of the researchers. The media pounced upon this and in their typical frenzied manner began referring to the earliest Britons as having been "Black."
'As Carles Lalueza-Fox has suggested, “… we cannot know the exact shade …” of the skin colour of Mesolithic Europeans, and while we might reasonably suppose that it was in some cases darker than is normal for modern Europeans, we should not assume that it was as dark as that of the darkest sub-Saharan Africans...
'...What Carles Lalueza-Fox also tells us is that other than with regard to colouration, the genome of Mesolithic Europeans is, “otherwise clearly northern European”, and this brings us to the crux of the matter, that even though our Mesolithic ancestors may have had darker colouration than we have on average today, and may have even been as darkly coloured as the darkest sub-Saharan Africans, they were not Negroes, they were in every other respect indistinguishable from people we would recognise as Northern Europeans today.' Source
In fact a 1997 DNA study has shown that the DNA of Cheddar Man has survived intact in the same local area. 9,000-Year-Old Cheddar Man Has Living Descendant Still Living in The Same Area. However, back to the 2018 study...
"Researchers including Susan Walsh at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis read Cheddar Man’s DNA. Walsh had helped develop a model that attempts to predict someone’s eye, hair and skin pigmentation solely from their DNA, and the team applied this model to Cheddar Man...
...Walsh stresses that the study doesn’t conclusively demonstrate Cheddar Man had dark to black skin. We cannot place such confidence in the DNA analysis, she says. For one thing, Cheddar Man’s DNA has degraded over the last 10,000 years....
“...It’s not a simple statement of ‘this person was dark-skinned’,” says Walsh. “It is his most probable profile, based on current research....
"...In fact, we are not ready to predict the skin colour of prehistoric people just from their genes, says Brenna Henn at Stony Brook University, New York. That’s because the genetics of skin pigmentation turn out to be more complex than thought." Source
So basically then this whole 2017-2018 DNA analysis was totally misrepresented, not only by the media, but even by certain members within the research team itself. In spite of the debunking, any search on the internet will still bring up the fake news headlines from 2018 as the most popular results. Furthermore, the current results results from Wikimedia Commons for "Cheddar Man" bring up many images of random black people and when those links are examined it is not possible to find any mention of Cheddar Man, or even Cheddar Cheese, on those pages.
As I said, I have no desire to stir up any controversy, but I feel it's important to demonstrate just how science, history and archaeology are still being used as political weapons - probably more so today than ever before.
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