The British Isles were less than hospitable for human habitation due to an immense sheet of ice.
Communities were invited to find a new home on its fertile soils as a result of the changing landscape. The region became a melting pot of culture due to the early migrants.
There are at least two different origin stories for the oldest human genomes found in Britain or Ireland.
There is a genome that can be linked with sites in Spain and Belgium.
One of the caves in Wales has a link to ancestors in Italy.
Both humans are thought to have been alive in Britain more than 13,500 years ago, just a few thousand years after the region's immense sheet of ice retreated towards theArctic.
The oldest bones are from the cave. Their ancestors are thought to have joined a wave of migration from northwest Europe at least a thousand years before they were born.
The person from Kendrick's Cave probably migrated from the Near East to Britain around 14,000 years ago.
"Finding the two ancestries so close in time in Britain, only a millennium or so apart, is adding to the emerging picture of Paleolithic Europe, which is one of a changing and dynamic population."
The British-Irish ice sheet was almost completely gone by 16,000 years ago. Fossils from this time are hard to come by, and other human remains that have been found only a few centuries before Britain's climate began to warm rapidly are also hard to find.
Who are these people and where did they come from?
The human fossil that was found in the cave was about 10,500 years old. The oldest human in England at the time had their whole genome mapped.
The findings show that the ancient man had dark skin and blue eyes, a sign that the population was still adapting to the higher latitudes. Members of an earlier migration to England were a part of the Cheddar Man's ancestry.
Many of the same researchers involved in earlier investigations are involved in this latest analysis to try to find more ancestral connections.
"We wanted to find out more about who these early populations in Britain might have been, and we worked on both papers," says a Biologist from England's Natural History Museum.
We knew from our previous work that western hunter-gatherers were in Britain by around 10,500 years BC, but we didn't know when they first arrived in Britain.
Post-glacial settlers in Britain may have been genetically distinct. They appear to be different from one another.
Their diet and burial practices were different. There are both animal and human bones in the cave. A human skull may have been used for cannibalism.
There are chemical traces in the bones of a human who ate fish and mammals. There are no signs of deer, aurochs, or horses that have been eaten.
The authors say that the evidence supports the idea that at least two different human groups were present in Britain during the Late Glacial period.
A combination of Goyet ancestry from sites in Belgium and El Mirn ancestry from Spain is connected to one of the two lineages.
Some models think that the Cheddar Man could be a mix of all three ancestries.
"This presents a picture of a dynamic and varied Late Glacial period within Britain, with changes occurring in the Late Upper Palaeolithic in diet, funerary behaviors, technologies, and genetic affinity at a time of rapid environmental and ecological change."
The emergence scenario is one of multiple genetic population turnover events in the United Kingdom, with the addition of our data to the existing knowledge of early prehistoric genetics in Britain.
The study was published in a scientific journal.
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