Scientists have created the world’s latest family tree in history.
The family tree links around 27 million people – both living and dead – from around the world.
The family tree was developed at the University of Oxford in England.
The final product is the largest human genealogy to date and shows how individuals across the globe are related to one another.
The project, published on Friday in the journal Science, is described by author and evolutionary geneticist Dr Yan Wong as “basically a huge family tree”.
The scientists were able to introduce new statistical and computational methods to easily combine data from different sources and accommodate the millions of genome sequences.
Currently, the tree brings together 3609 human genome sequences – 3601 modern and eight ancient – from across eight datasets and 215 populations. The ancient genomes included samples aged from the 10000s to more than 100,000 years.
The resulting tree has 231 million ancestral lineages.
