Largest ever human family tree: 27 million ancestors
Abstract illustration of people, world map .Researchers from the University of Oxford's Big Data Institute have taken a major step towards mapping the entirety of genetic relationships among humans: a single genealogy that traces the ancestry of all of us. The study has been published today inThe past two decades have seen extraordinary advancements in human genetic research, generating genomic data for hundreds of thousands of individuals, including from thousands of prehistoric people.
Dr Yan Wong, an evolutionary geneticist at the Big Data Institute, and one of the principal authors, explained:"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. This genealogy allows us to see how every person's genetic sequence relates to every other, along all the points of the genome.
Lead author Dr Anthony Wilder Wohns, who undertook the research as part of his PhD at the Big Data Institute and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, said:"Essentially, we are reconstructing the genomes of our ancestors and using them to form a vast network of relationships. We can then estimate when and where these ancestors lived.
After adding location data on these sample genomes, the authors used the network to estimate where the predicted common ancestors had lived. The results successfully recaptured key events in human evolutionary history, including the migration out of Africa.