ABSTRACT
Andrew Wilder Wohns et al, “A unified genealogy of modern and ancient genomes”, Science, Vol. 375, 2022. DOI: 10.1126/science.abi8264
Building family trees is very popular with many people. But such an attempt is likely to take the process back to just a few generations at the most. In some cases, families have been traced back to hundreds of years. Now, we are to see that science has enabled us to take this process back thousands of years, and we can have a family tree of the entire human race, according to a study published in the Science journal. These family trees are constructed not by identifying individuals that one has descended from, but by taking from the human genomic databases, details of each chromosome (autosome) and constructing a “tree” that relates it to the parent from whom that particular chromosome was inherited. New work by researchers from the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute builds up the family tree of the entire human race using this new methodology. This is the largest family tree ever, built with about 27 million ancestral haplotype fragments (ancestral DNA). The research has been published in the February 25 issue of Science, this year (“A unified genealogy of modern and ancient genomes”, Andrew Wilder Wohns et al, Science, Vol. 375, 2022).
