Unlike the family tree you’ve done yourself, which likely traces your family to all sorts of places of origins, every single human eventually traces back here: to a spot of desert in the northeast of Sudan.
It’s not far from the Nile river, and recent research from the Big Data Institute suggests it might be the homeland of every single person alive today.
Dr. Anthony Wilder Wohns, lead author of the published study, explained further.
Essentially, we are reconstructing the genomes of our ancestors and using them to form a vast network of relationships. We can then estimate when and where these ancestors lived.
Since the advent of online family trees and readily available DNA analysis became available, scientists have been working on ways to take it global.
Now, evolutionary geneticist Dr. Yan Wong says it’s finally happened.
We have basically built a huge family tree, a genealogy for all of humanity. This genealogy allows us to see how every person’s genetic sequence relates to every other, along all the points of the genome.
They had to use data from eight different human genome databases to create their network of around 27 million ancestors, and used samples not just from modern humans, but our ancient relatives as well.
