According to a study, humans originated in a single location in Africa
Family tree theory has been around for a long time. The primary purpose of genealogy research is to identify one's forebears and earlier generations; nevertheless, a number of hypotheses propose that all people may have a single common ancestor. Upon investigating the veracity and accuracy of the claim, experts from the Big Data Institute at the University of Oxford arrived at an astounding result. All of our ancestors may be traced back to a single genealogy that they found. The study showed the relationships between people worldwide and was published in the journal Science.
According to an official press release, the researchers integrated data from several sources for their analysis, accounting for millions of genomic sequences. Eight distinct databases provided the information on the genomes of current and prehistoric humans, which included 3,609 individual DNA sequences from 215 populations. According to the study, although every human has unique characteristics, they also have an unexpected connection.
Other studies point out the idea that several ancestors left Africa during different periods in history. This is dated to around 72,000 years ago. It is possible that the ancestors then settled in parts of America and other areas way before the idea of archaeological evidence of human presence came into play.
"We have built a massive family tree, an ancestor for all of humankind that models as closely as we can the history that created all the genetic variation we find in humans today," said Dr. Yan Wong, an evolutionary geneticist at the Big Data Institute and one of the main authors. We can see the relationships between each person's DNA sequence and every other person along the entire genome thanks to this genealogy.
The study's lead scientist, Anthony Wilder Wohns, clarified that Northeastern Africa is where human genetic variants first originated. But according to Reuters, this is probably a long time when the species emerged. In his explanation, Wohns stated that the oldest known relatives were located in what is now modern-day Sudan. Compared to modern estimations of the age of Homo sapiens, which place them between 250,000 and 300,000 years ago, these forebears lived up to and beyond a million years ago. Therefore, some of our genetic makeup has been inherited from people who do not fit the definition of contemporary humans.
"Using our research, we were able to estimate the age of ancestors in the Americas to be 56,000 years old. Additionally, we calculated that a sizable population of our ancestors lived in Oceania, namely Papua New Guinea, approximately 140,000 years ago," Wohns added. The researchers do note, though, that this is not regarded as substantial evidence. "Our genes carry the history of humanity, and by reassembling our family tree, we can read that past," Wohns proclaimed.
