The following is an excerpt of a longer story.
Personal genomics companies that type SNPs genome-wide can identify blocks of shared genetic material between people in their databases, offering the chance to identify distant relatives. Finding a connection to someone else who is an unknown relative is exciting, whether you do this through your family tree or through personal genomics (we’ve both pored over our 23&me results a bunch). However, given the fact that nearly everyone in Europe is related to nearly everyone else over the past 1000 years (see our recent paper and FAQs), and likely everyone in the world is related over the past ~3000 years, how should you interpret that genetic connection?
View the full story here: Identification of genomic regions shared between distant relatives
