KUALA LUMPUR (March 11): The world’s biggest family tree linking around 27 million people has been created by scientists.

The genetic model created by University of Oxford researchers combines thousands of modern and prehistoric genomes, providing new insight into key events in human history.

In a statement Wednesday (March 9), the university said the past two decades have seen extraordinary advancements in human genetic research, generating genomic data for hundreds of thousands of individuals, including from thousands of prehistoric people.

It said this raises the possibility of tracing the origins of human genetic diversity to produce a complete map of how individuals across the world are related to each other.

University of Oxford's Big Data Institute evolutionary geneticist and one of the principal authors Dr Yan Wong said the researchers had built a huge family tree, a genealogy for all of humanity that models as exactly as can the history that generated all the genetic variation found in humans today.

“This genealogy allows us to see how every person's genetic sequence relates to every other, along all the points of the genome,” he said.

The research team combed through eight databases containing 3,609 different genome sequences from 215 populations.

They included samples from across the world; some being over 100,000 years old.

The resulting network contained almost 27 million ancestors and 231 million ancestral lineages.

The tree reveals how people across the world are related in unprecedented detail.

Individual regions of DNA are inherited from either the mother or father. Each point can be thought of as a tree.

A set — known as a “tree sequence” — links them to common ancestors where mutations first appeared.

Computer algorithms explain the patterns, predicting when and where they lived.

The study covers the migration out of Africa, interbreeding with Neanderthals, and the arrival of primitive humans in Asia and Oceania.

Wong said the study is laying the groundwork for the next generation of DNA sequencing.

“As the quality of genome sequences from modern and ancient DNA samples improves, the trees will become even more accurate and we will eventually be able to generate a single, unified map that explains the descent of all the human genetic variation we see today,” he said.