> but similarly it seems quite a stretch to assume that they were as dark as African peoples.

“African peoples” have a pretty broad range of pigmentation, and “black” isn’t used exclusively for African people, anyhow; e.g., indigenous Australians.

It's funny how White people use “black” with almost unlimited breadth right up until that challenges the original whiteness of territory they view as an ancestral homeland, and then immediately start demanding that the blackness be viewed maximally narrowly.

Couldn't find a better illustration of how race is a fluid social construct.

> It's funny how White people use “black” with almost unlimited breadth right up until that challenges the original whiteness of territory they view as an ancestral homeland, and then immediately start demanding that the blackness be viewed maximally narrowly.

That’s a pretty impressive generalization. It’s also not very charitable to imply that people are being defensive about some sort of racial homeland instead of taking them at their word that they are skeptical of the wild conclusions that aren’t supported by the science.

Fascinating that you singled out white people. The original poster could have any ethnic heritage, but you went with white. Why is that? It may be a good idea to interrogate your biases.

> Fascinating that you singled out white people. The original poster could have any ethnic heritage, but you went with white.

I wasn't commenting about the original poster but about the broad community that have been making this exact argument about this exact issue since it entered the public debate, and a wide number of other issues for, well, almost the entire time that population studies that would support this kind of discussion of the past have existed.

(And, yes, you can see identical behavior referencing different identity divides besides white and non-white in the same period over the same broad class of past-population issues, but this specific issue of darker-skinned past inhabitants of the British Isles is one of the focuses of whites and the flexible nature of the label “black”.)

Would you say the same if someone questioned the original race of Sub Saharan Africans in distant history? If someone argued some were originally not Black and so therefore the ancestral homelands of Afro-Black people are in question, would you say the same thing or is race only a social construct when trying to define the white race? That is certainly the way the logic seems to be but I think that cuts two ways. If race is a social construct then there isn't a Black nation, Black peoples, or anything ancestral to anyone who identifies as Black. Is that a stance you will defend? It seems like there is a clear definition of race for Black and Brown people but not for white people, often done so politically, and I think that bias is why people question whether the headlines of the GP article are valid and at present it does seem to be a stretch to call Cheddar Man "black".

> Would you say the same if someone questioned the original race of Sub Saharan Africans in distant history?

Nobody is questioning the ancestral homeland of anyone. Just because some Scandanavians were dark skinned or had ancestors from outside Scandanavia - maybe even somewhere where people were mostly dark skinned - doesn't mean they weren't Scandanavian, unless you choose to believe that "Scandanavia" is a racial and not a geographic term.

At some point in relatively recent history some European ethno-nationalists developed this concept of a "racial homeland" and unfortunately to this day that way of thinking holds appeal among some groups.

All humans ultimately descend from hominids from more equatorial regions, and on the scale of hominid history we've only very recently left those regions.

> If race is a social construct then there isn't a Black nation, Black peoples, or anything ancestral to anyone who identifies as Black.

It's exactly the opposite, black identity exists precisely because race is a social construct, and furthermore is a powerful construct that has dictated the fates of untold millions throughout history.

That's why I put "black" in quotation marks, as it covers a whole range of skin tones that exist mostly in the eye of the beholder. The reconstructions or artistic depictions of those early Britons doesn't make me think Africa as much as it makes me think exposure to the sun by a non-fair-skinned population.

I am from very Northern European stock and I get very dark with consistent exposure to the sun despite my extensive freckled skin. My brother by the same parents was often mistaken for someone from Southern Italy or Mexico especially if it was Summer.

It sounds like your problem is with sensationalized science journalism, not science itself. In which case, yeah, we all agree with you.

> What wasn't said was that they were black

> it seems quite a stretch to assume that they were as dark as African peoples.

Africans also aren't the color black. Nobody said the first Britons were SubSaharan African at all. They just said they had dark skin.

This is bolstered by the discovery that a widespread gene - SLC24A5 - associated with fairer skin is a recent (8k years ago) phenomenon in Europe associated with the arrival of middle eastern farmers, in whom it developed due to their Vitamin-D poor cereal-based diet [1].

The same gene is present across Eurasia through to South Asia, and is partially responsible for pigmentation variation there also, even moreso than in Europe, where the gene is almost ubiquitous today. [2]

Of course it's not the only gene that controls depigmentation. Depigmentation in East Asia is not related to that gene at all - though it could be similarly influenced by cereal-based diets.

1. https://www.livescience.com/42838-european-hunter-gatherer-g...

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3820762/