MiddleEasterners have the fair skin mutation. And their skin color is considered fair skin. Fair skin was introduced into Europe by Neolithic MiddleEastern farmers.
Cheddar Man, like La Brana is a Western Hunter Gatherer (WHG), so he isn't racially East Asiatic like the Inuit. In West Eurasians, fair skin is associated with a specific mutation, which WHGs did not have.
I do not think the scientists are claiming dark skin absent evidence strongly pointing in that direction, because the earlier reconstruction of Cheddar Man portrayed him with fair skin, this was back when science did not know about the fair skin mutation in west Eurasians. The arguable point is just how dark his skin was. It could have been closer to the brown skin of a San bushmen than the black of a Western African.
Where did the BBC claim Romans were Black? I know they suggested there were Blacks within the ranks of Roman legions, but I do not recall they ever claiming the Romans as a whole were Black. This claim of dark or black skin for Cheddar Man isn't a claim made by media, it is coming from reputable institutions of higher learning. If there was any sort of politically motivated manipulation going on, the claim would be severely criticized by peers in the academic community.
There isn't a mass conspiracy by academic institutions to invent or cover-up results, but mass media, instead of presenting conclusions in a measured and cautious tone, often times goes overboard in how they present academic findings . That's not the fault of the Academics, it is the fault of popular media, who want sensationalist headlines and or have a social agenda to push. If there was just a conspiracy to lie about history to make people accept open borders and mass immigration into the West, you wouldn't have seen the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Co.) and Discovery Channel peddle the unsupported fringe hypothesis of Paleolithic European hunter-gatherers arriving in North America before the ancestors of the Amerindians.
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The actual paper on Cheddar Man will be out soon.
The Natural History Museum in London has a write-up on Cheddar Man.
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/cheddar-man-mesolithic-britain-blue-eyed-boy.html
ScienceMag
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018...heddar-man-one-england-s-oldest-modern-humans
Phys.org . Chris Stringer comments on the dark skin of Cheddar Man. Stringer is respected and well known paleoanthropoligst. Not the sort of person to make bold claims unsupported by evidence, to further a social agenda. The only surprising thing about his statement in the below article is him mentioning it is "
very surprising" Cheddar Man had dark skin and blue eyes. For folks following this field, it isn't all that surprising, since La Brana 1 was also shown to have dark skin and blue eyes. Maybe he was just speaking from the point of view of what a layman would know.
https://phys.org/news/2018-02-dna-modern-briton-dark-skin.html