The research, carried out by scientists from the University of Oxford's Big Data Institute, combines human genomes from a variety of sources to better understand human history and evolution.
Researchers have used genetics to create the largest human family tree ever made, allowing individuals to find out who their distant ancestors were and where they lived, as well as exactly how they are related to everyone alive today.
"Simply put, what we did was we created the largest human family tree ever," Wohns said."We have a single genealogy that traces the ancestry of all of humanity, and shows how we're all related to each other today." However, it has proven difficult to combine different databases, integrate ancient and modern genomes, and work out ways of handling such a large amount of data. $ { var messages=[ { 'title': 'Subscribe to stay connected to Tucson.', 'msg': 'A subscription helps you access more of the local stories that keep you connected to the community.
For example, there is some evidence that human ancestors were in North America earlier than previously thought, although further research would be needed to reveal unknown migrations, he said. "It's going to be a really rich resource for future investigation into human evolutionary history," he said.