Ancestry and family research via genetic testing has long been hip, and hipper than ever with the fall in the price of genome decoding.
In the USA, for example, it is said that genealogy, the technical term for genealogical research, is the second favorite hobby in the country - after gardening and measured by Internet clicks, even before browsing porn sites.
With high-resolution genetic analysis, however, central and major questions about human development and origins can increasingly be answered.
The "longest line of human ancestry" since the beginning of genealogical research has just been published in the journal "Science".
At least that's what the British and American scientists around Anthony Wilder Wohns from the Broad Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Oxford University call their family tree of Homo sapiens.
Joachim Müller-Jung
Editor in the feuilleton, responsible for the "Nature and Science" department.
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A "genealogy of everyone and everyone" is their analysis.
In other words: All representatives of Homo sapiens should be able to find themselves in the molecular-biological phylogenetic history that they tell - even if by no means all of us have given biosamples and thus genome data for them , which can be assigned to 215 different populations from different parts of the world.
For the most part, these are people living today who wanted their genome almost completely decoded and deposited it in one of three major human genome databases for research, and to a lesser extent it is the genome data of prehistoric people, their remains by archaeologists and recovered and genetically deciphered by paleogeneticists.
Among them is not only genetic material from long-dead representatives of Homo sapiens, early African or Oceanic cultures, but also Neanderthals and a Denisova genome.
In addition, more than three thousand less well-preserved genome fragments from archaeological studies were used for the molecular-biological relationship analysis.
More than 6.5 million usable gene variants - peppered with millions and millions of different mutations and recombination patterns - have been identified.
The relationships between the gene variants of different ages were then determined using computer simulations and statistical methods.
In addition, more than three thousand less well-preserved genome fragments from archaeological studies were used for the molecular-biological relationship analysis.
More than 6.5 million usable gene variants - peppered with millions and millions of different mutations and recombination patterns - have been identified.
The relationships between the gene variants of different ages were then determined using computer simulations and statistical methods.
In addition, more than three thousand less well-preserved genome fragments from archaeological studies were used for the molecular-biological relationship analysis.
More than 6.5 million usable gene variants - peppered with millions and millions of different mutations and recombination patterns - have been identified.
The relationships between the gene variants of different ages were then determined using computer simulations and statistical methods.
The result was a gigantic, if still reasonably rough, molecular relationship analysis, in which the researchers believe traces of central events in human development can also be found.
Genetic bottlenecks are always recognizable in individual populations - sudden genetic changes that have spread relatively quickly and homogeneously in the respective population.
An indication that, according to the scientists, there have been repeated population slumps in the past tens of thousands of years since the emigration from Africa, presumably caused by famine, climatic extremes or conflicts.
In fact, the lineage of modern Europeans, Americans,
Asians and descendants from Oceania to Papua New Guinea to the putative common ancestors in North Africa.
And the migrations of Homo sapiens within Africa, which is also part of the out-of-Africa theory, can be traced genetically.
However, this first-time consistent merging of modern and archaic genome data into “unified genealogy” still has its limits, as the researchers concede in their publication.
This is not only due to the incompleteness of the finds and the still globally unequal distribution of high-quality genome data, but also to the reliability of the decoding techniques themselves. Because many of the genome sequencing processes produce errors during decoding, which particularly limits the significance of the molecular data contained in the older genome archives data limited.