Human evolution: Largest ever family tree reveals our species’ history
, 2022-02-24 02:00:00,
A visualisation of relationships between ancestors and descendants in the genealogy of modern and ancient genomes Wohns et al. (2022)
Meet your relatives. A family tree of humanity has been constructed using genetic data from thousands of modern and prehistoric people. The tree gives a view of 2 million years of prehistory and evolution.
“Humans are all ultimately related to each other,” says Gil McVean at the University of Oxford. “What I’ve long wanted to do is to be able to represent the totality of what we can learn about human history through this genealogy.”
The new family tree suggests that our earliest roots were in north-east Africa. It also offers clues that people reached Papua New Guinea and the Americas tens of thousands of years earlier than the archaeological record implies, hinting at early migrations that haven’t yet been discovered. However, both these ideas would need to be confirmed by archaeologists.
Geneticists have been reading people’s entire genomes for the past two decades. McVean and his colleagues compiled 3609 complete genomes, almost all of which belonged to our species, Homo sapiens, except for three Neanderthals and one from the Denisovan group, which may be a subspecies of H. sapiens or a separate species.
Putting them together into a tree was challenging. “The different data sets have been produced over time, using different technologies, analysed in different ways,” says McVean.
The team focused on bits of…
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