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If you’ve ever made a family tree, there’s a good chance you were able to track your lineage across several generations and at least a hundred years. While that might seem interesting enough, imagine if you were able to find out exactly where your distant relatives were up to 100,000 years ago. Thanks to scientists from the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute, who used genetics to create the largest human family tree ever made, that may be a possibility. The new research allows individuals to find out who their distant ancestors are, where they lived, and how they’re related to everyone today, CNN reports.

The researchers combined human genomes from both ancient and modern DNA to gain a better understanding of human history and evolution. To create the family tree, researchers sequenced the genes of 3,609 people from 215 populations, with some dating back to 100,000 years ago. The research makes it possible to shows which genes are shared between two people, meaning that anyone who has access to their own genetic information can figure out when their ancestors moved to a particular place and why they have certain genes. “Simply put, what we did was we created the largest human family tree ever,” says lead study author Anthony Wilder Wohns. “We have a single genealogy that traces the ancestry of all of humanity, and shows how we’re all related to each other today.”

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