A 2022 attempt at creating a sweeping family tree for the human race, and at least three others, reached back 2 million years, long before Homo sapiens are believed to have originated in Africa 200,000 years ago.
The study from Oxford’s Big Data Institute drew on 3,601 human genomes taken from several modern databases, eight ancient individuals and 3,589 more ancient samples derived from 100 other studies. Using specialized algorithms, the researchers fleshed out the tree further, adding limbs until it reached about 27 million ancestors.
The result was sprawling and inexact, but as the researchers say in a press release, it’s a first tree with more to come. “As the quality of genome sequences from modern and ancient DNA samples improves,” says Yan Wong, an evolutionary geneticist at the Big Data Institute, “the trees will become even more accurate, and we will eventually be able to generate a single, ...
