Scientists have created the biggest ever family tree – linking around 27 million people.
It goes back tens of thousands of years and sheds new light on the evolution of our species.
The British team’s breakthrough is a major step towards mapping the ancestry of every single one of us.
It may also help medical research by identifying genetic predictors of disease.
Principal author Dr Yan Wong said: “We have basically built a huge family tree.
“It is 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. [It] allows us to see how every person’s genetic sequence relates to every other.”
The Oxford University study, which combines modern and ancient genomes, reveals in unprecedented detail how people across the world are related. Recent decades have generated genomes from hundreds of thousands of people – some from tens of thousands of years ago.
Variable quality and limitations in analyses made painting an accurate picture impossible, until now. The new technique, described in journal Science, allows for missing data.
Dr Wong said: “This study is laying the groundwork for the next generation of DNA sequencing.” The scientists were able to reconstruct the genomes of our ancestors, with computer algorithms being used to predict when and where they lived. The team trawled eight databases containing 3,609 genome sequences.
Some samples were 100,000 years old. The resulting network contained almost 27 million ancestors.
