t’s well known that all humans alive today can be traced back to a common ancestor but a study may have found where that ancestor originates.
Researchers at the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute mapped the entirety of genetic relationships among humans to create the largest human family tree ever.
By combining modern and ancient human genomes data from eight different databases, the researchers were able to create a massive family tree.
In a press release, Dr Yan Wong, an evolutionary geneticist at the Big Data Institute, and one of the co-authors of the study, said: “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.”
The study says that the individual genomic regions are only inherited from one parent, either the mother or the father.
They described each point on the genome as a tree, with a set of trees known as a ‘tree sequence’.
This links genetic regions back through to time to ancestors, which is where the genetic variation first popped up.
Other lead author Dr Anthony Wilder Wohns 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.
“The power of our approach is that it makes very few assumptions about the underlying data and can also include both modern and ancient DNA samples.”
So from estimates that the researchers came up with, the ancestors apparently lived in Sudan, Africa.
Dr Wohns told Reuters: “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.
“So bits of our genome have been inherited from individuals who we wouldn’t recognize as modern humans.”
Researchers got the data from 3,609 individual genome sequences from 215 populations.
These samples ranged from 1,000s of years ago to over 100,000 years in the midst of time.
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