Researchers have created the largest human family tree ever, allowing people to learn about who their distant ancestors were. Scientists hope the work will one day enable them to map the entirety of mankind’s genetic relationships. University of Oxford scientists have compiled human genomes from an assortment of sources, including ancient and modern DNA, to gain a better understanding of human history and evolution.
Researchers published the study on Thursday in the science journal. It predicts common ancestors, as well as approximate dates and locations of their lives. ‘We have basically built a huge family tree, a genealogy for all of humanity that models as exactly as we can the history that generated all the genetic variation we find in humans today,’ said Yan Wong, an evolutionary geneticist at Oxford’s Big Data Institute.
Wong, one of the study’s principal authors, explained that genealogy is able to show us how each individual’s genes relate to each other across all of the points of the genome. ‘Tree sequences’ or ‘ancestral recombination graphs’ link genetic regions back through time to ancestral populations where the genetic variation first appeared, the researchers reported.
A comprehensive map will be produced to show how individuals around the world relate to one another. Data from eight different databases were integrated to create a study exploring ancient and modern human genomes. The study included a total of 3,609 individual genome sequences from 215 populations spanning more than 100,000 years. To explain the patterns of genetic variation, the algorithm predicted where common ancestors must be present in evolutionary trees. Approximately 27 million ancestors were found in the resulting network.
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