Researchers from Oxford University’s Big Data Institute have engaged in the most Herculean of tasks and combined ancient and modern DNA to record the largest family tree ever made , dating back a whopping 100,000 years! Published in the journal Human Evolution earlier this week, the study allows individuals to ascertain who their far removed and distant ancestors are, and also links to people alive today.

Just as a family tree shows how an individual is related to their parents or siblings, genetic genealogy reveals which genes are shared between two individuals, says lead author Anthony Wilder Wohns, a postdoctoral researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

The largest family tree ever created, by the Oxford Big Data Institute, covered over 50,000 generations of humans! ( Human Evolution )

The Largest Family Tree Made With 50,000 Generations of Data

“Simply put, what we did was we created the largest human family tree ever,” Wohns said. “We have a single genealogy that traces the ancestry of all of humanity, and shows how we’re all related to each other today. It’s basically understanding the entire story of human history that’s written in our genes . 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’,” Wohns explained.

This mammoth task would not be possible without the sophistication and computational abilities of the most advanced technology, which has literally revolutionized human genetic research in the past twenty years. Genetic data for hundreds of thousands of individuals have been generated, including thousands of prehistoric possibilities, paving the way for individuals in the most far off and disconnected places to see how they are potentially related to people far away.

The study’s lead authors Wohns and Yan Wong explained, in an article in The Conversation , how they made the world’s largest family tree. This enormous family tree of recent human evolution was “built” from 215 diverse human populations from varying times and geographic locations. The genealogy, lines of descent from our common ancestors, includes the genomes of 3,601 people from three separate datasets, as well as eight high quality ancient genomes.

The ancient genomes came from three Neanderthals who lived in Eurasia until around 40,000 years ago, a Denisovan individual (based on a bone shard found in a Siberian cave), and a family…