All Humans May Have Originated From Africa
We are all African is a saying you've probably heard before. It might actually be true, according to a recent study from the Big Data Institute at the University of Oxford.
They used the genetic ties between people to create the broadest human family tree ever and found that humanity originated in what is now the modern-day Sudan.
The study was conducted back in February of this year, and it is undoubtedly very fascinating for learning about the genesis of humanity as well as how long human history has actually been going on.
Modern and genomic data from eight distinct databases were integrated by the research team. They claim that just one of our parents, and not both, pass on specific genetic areas to us.
Every location on the genome is referred to as a "tree," and each tree has its own "tree sequence." Then, they were able to trace genomic regions back to their distant relatives, all the way to the time and place at which genetic diversity originally appeared.
“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,”
said Dr. Yan Wong.
“This genealogy allows us to see how every person’s genetic sequence relates to every other, along all the points of the genome.”
Lead author Dr. Anthony Wilder Whons concurred, stating that it was essentially the biggest human genome mapping project ever. 3,609 individual genome sequences from 215 populations provided the researchers with the data.
“Essentially, we are reconstructing the genomes of our ancestors and using them to form a vast network of relationships,”
he said. “We can then estimate when and where these ancestors lived.
The researchers' thorough methodology enabled them to examine both ancient and modern genomes. This led to the creation of a network of about 27 million ancestors. That is a very amazing accomplishment.
"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.”
As you can expect, our forefathers were very different from who we are today. They were a completely separate species of human who did nothing more than trigger the evolution of homo sapiens and ultimately modern humans.
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