Science !
The world’s biggest family tree linking around 27 million people has been created by scientists. The genetic model combines thousands of modern and prehistoric genomes, providing new insight into key events in human history.
The breakthrough is a major step towards mapping the entirety of human relationships, with a single lineage that traces the ancestry of all people on Earth. The family tree also has widespread implications for medical research, identifying genetic predictors of disease.
“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,” says principal author Dr. Yan Wong in a university release.
The University of Oxford team combed through eight databases containing 3,609 different genome sequences from 215 populations. They included samples from across the world; some being over 100,000 years-old. The resulting network contained almost 27 million ancestors and 231 million ancestral lineages.
Yeah, I immediately made a couple jokes about how portions of that tree running through parts of the US probably do not fork.
