Human ancestry has been traced for many years as it's not a new phenomenon. However, a new study may have made an outstanding breakthrough by discovering where everybody originates, and you are about to be blown away by its findings.
Keep reading to find out more about this study.
The biggest human family tree was eventually mapped out by researchers from the Big Data Institute at the University of Oxford, utilizing information about human genetic ties.
The researchers constructed a sizable family tree by merging information from eight separate sources of both contemporary and ancient human genomes.
Using the genome's points, they could observe how one person's genetic sequence related to that of another.
One of the study's co-authors and evolutionary geneticist at the Big Data Institute, Dr. Yan Wong, stated the following in a press release:
"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."
According to the findings, each genetic area may only be passed down from one parent, either the mother or the father. Each location on the genome was characterized as a tree, with a collection of trees known as a "tree sequence."
This traces the origin of the genetic variation in certain regions of the genome back to ancestors.
3,609 distinct genome sequences from 215 populations and samples with ages ranging from a few hundred to over 100,000 years were used in the study.
Algorithms could estimate where common ancestors were in evolutionary trees to explain some patterns of genetic variation by employing a new technique to gather the data.
A network of about 27 million ancestors was the result. The data not only improves our understanding of human geology, but the new methodology may also be useful in other fields of study, such as medicine.
According to the experts' best guesses, the ancestors most likely resided in Sudan, an African country. According to Dr. Wohns:
"The very earliest ancestors we identify trace back in time to a geographic location that is in modern Sudan.
"These ancestors lived up to and over 1 million years ago—which is much older than current estimates for the age of Homo sapiens—250,000 to 300,000 years ago.
Dr. Wohns continued, "So bits of our genome have been inherited from individuals who we wouldn’t recognize as modern humans."
The samples used to gather data ranged in age from a few hundred years ago to more than 100,000 years ago.
Though not quite definitive, this study nonetheless offers some very useful insights. It will need more investigation to see how accurate this data is, but it is certainly intriguing.
