Nine thousand years without leaving the neighbourhood

Cheddar Man is Britain's oldest near-complete skeleton, at roughly 9,000 years old. He was found in 1903 in Gough's Cave, in Cheddar Gorge, in the south-west of England. In 1997, a team from Oxford University managed to extract mitochondrial DNA from one of his teeth and compared it with samples from a handful of local volunteers. There was a match: Adrian Targett, a history teacher at the local school, shared a maternal line with the skeleton. In other words, a common ancestress, passed from mother to daughter across nine millennia. And Targett lived less than a mile from the cave. While empires fell, oceans were crossed and whole cities were founded and abandoned, one family simply stayed put: walking the same hills, drinking the same water. The shortest house move in history took nine thousand years. Chance supplied the punchline with perfect aim: the heir to all that local memory ended up making his living teaching history.