A new “genealogy of everyone” enables a comprehensive understanding of the human family

By combining thousands of modern and ancient genomes across a host of datasets, researchers have constructed the largest human genealogy to date, according to a new study. This new “genealogy of everyone” provides insight into key events in human history together with their timings and geographical locations. Both modern and ancient genomes are invaluable tools that have vastly improved our understanding of human evolution and the long history of human populations on Earth. To date, thousands of human genomes have been collected. However, different methods of obtaining such data, their variable quality, and inherent limitations in analyses applied, particularly for fragmented ancient DNA, make comparisons among myriad genomes difficult. What’s more, each human genome contains segments from different and multiple ancestries of varying ages. As a result, painting a complete picture of genealogy and genomic variation across human history represents a considerable technical challenge and, thus, remains unresolved. Anthony Wohns and colleagues address this by applying a non-parametric tree-recording method to ancient and modern human genomes, which allowed the authors to infer a comprehensive genealogy of modern and ancient humans. The method, which leverages more than 3,500 modern and high-quality ancient genomes from more than 215 different human populations and an additional 3,000 lesser-quality ancient genomes, allows for missing and erroneous data and uses fragmented ancient genomes to help identify the timing of the emergence of alleles. From this, Wohns et al. developed a unified human genealogy that records key population events in human history, including those well characterized, such as the out-of-Africa migration. “The power and resolution of tree-recording methods promise to help clarify the evolutionary history of humans and other species,” write Jasmin Rees and Aida Andrés in a related Perspective. “It is likely that the most powerful ways to infer evolutionary history going forward will have their foundations firmly set in these methods.”