TRENDING SCIENCE: We are (all) family

No matter where we’re from, scientific – and unscientific – sources say we consist of a single family. A research team at the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute (BDI) published a paper in the journal ‘Science’ that drives this point home further.“Simply put, what we did was we created the largest human family tree ever. We have a single genealogy that traces the ancestry of all of humanity, and shows how we’re all related to each other today,” lead author Dr Anthony Wilder Wohns told ‘CNN’. “It’s basically understanding the entire story of human history that’s written in our genes ... It’s going to be a really rich resource for future investigation into human evolutionary history.”

Combining ancient and modern DNA, the massive family tree connects about 27 million people. The researchers explored 8 databases containing 3 609 genome sequences from 215 populations around the world. The samples range in age from thousands to more than 100 000 years old. They used computer algorithms to predict when and where our ancestors lived. The final network built contained nearly 27 million human ancestors.

Corresponding author Dr Yan Wong, an evolutionary geneticist at the BDI, explained in a news release that the tree is “a genealogy for all of humanity that models as exactly as we can the history that generated all the variation in the modern human genome. This genealogy allows us to see how every person’s genetic sequence relates to every other, along all the points of the genome.”Dr Wohns added: “Essentially, we are reconstructing the genomes of our ancestors and using them to form a series of linked evolutionary trees that we call a ‘tree sequence’. 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.” He elaborated: “While humans are the focus of this study, the method is valid for most living things; from orang-utans to bacteria. It could be particularly beneficial in medical genetics, in separating out true associations between genetic regions and diseases from spurious connections arising from our shared ancestral history.”

“This study is laying the groundwork for the next generation of DNA sequencing,” Dr Wong concluded. “As the quality of genome sequences from modern and ancient DNA samples improves, the tree will become even more accurate and we will eventually be able to generate a single, unified map that explains the descent of all the human genetic variation we see today.”

Just imagine a complete map of how individuals all over the planet are related to each other. Thought you already had too many relatives and so little time?