Researchers from the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute ended up mapping out the largest ever human family tree ever by using the genetic relationships among humans.
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.
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.”
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