A few years ago, I was asked to present a documentary at the cutting edge of science and history. It would investigate one of England’s most important archaeological discoveries – an almost complete skeleton of a 10,000-year-old Mesolithic hunter-gatherer, who came to be known as Cheddar Man. Cheddar Man had the same skin tone you would expect to find in people living in West or Central Africa. In other words, he was Black.
It’s hard now to overstate the furore this discovery sparked in the British press at the time, as the tabloids grappled with the idea that the “indigenous” English looked more like my ancestors in Ghana than the white inhabitants often referred to as “indigenous” today.