According to scientists, the most complete human family tree

Researchers from the UK’s Big Data Institute have mapped humanity’s most comprehensive family tree to date, including up to 2 million years ago, to the presentsince the ancestors of modern humans were still tree-climbing in northeastern Africa.

The study, published in the journal Science on February 25, It divided modern human genomes into groups, according to their proximity, and reconstructed how all current genomic diversity is created..

In a statement, the researchers explained that since individual genomic regions are inherited only from either the father or the mother, the origin of each stretch of the genome can be represented as a tree.

This set of trees connects genetic regions through time with ancestors and with the place on the map where each genetic variation first appeared.

This approach Lets you visualize when and where these ancestors lived With “too few assumptions about the underlying data”.

The modern sample consists of 3,609 individual genome sequences, taken from 215 groups, while the ancient genomes are few and include three Neanderthal genomes, one Denisovan, and a family of four that lived in Siberia about 4,600 years ago.

The algorithms used predicted where common ancestors should be in phylogenetic trees to explain patterns of genetic variation. The resulting network, from these thousands of genetic codes at the input, is included Nearly 27 million ancestorsBy machine, he restores lost relationships between individuals and populations.

“We have built a large family tree, a genealogical chain for all of humanity, that models as accurately as possible the history that generated every variation in the modern human genome,” said one of the study’s lead authors, evolutionary geneticist Yan Wong.

In addition, scientists view the algorithm used as a “powerful platform for collecting genetic data and investigating human history and evolution,” as well as other species: from orangutans to bacteria.

(with information from Russia Today)