On February 22, 2022, Dr. Yan Wong, an evolutionary geneticist at Oxford College, created the most extensive family tree ever that humans have made, allowing them to pinpoint relatively accurately the origin of the human species.

According to the research, Dr. Yan Wong and Anthony Wilder Wohns, a postdoctoral researcher in statistical and population genetics at the broad institute, Harvard University, have found out that the origin of humans was likely to be located in the northeast of Sudan, Africa.

Initially, Dr. Yan Wong claims that he is interested in a wide variety of biological problems, and his research group has worked on this model of the family tree to more precisely work out the similarities and differences of different people at a genetic level.

However, while making the family tree, Dr. Yan Wong and his research team were able to estimate where and when our ancestors lived.

Dr. Yan Wong stated that he and his college Anthony Wilder Wohns “think the key to understanding this is held in our ancestry, and in particular in the genetic genealogy (the study of families, family histories, and tracing of their lineages) that relates us all. 

The task was approached by using a computer algorithm that takes genetic similarities and differences, accurately constructing the relationships of each other. 

This work was able to be done because Dr. Yan Wong had made the biggest family tree using genomes, which is a genetic material of an organism that is made up of DNA from people from recent times and also from the ancient times.

More accurately, the genomes were collected from 3,601 recent people from three datasets and eight high-quality genomes of distant ancestors. 

The ancient genomes were from three Neanderthals (an extinct human subspecies who lived in Eurasia until around 40,000 years ago), a Denisovan (another subspecies more recently discovered in a Siberian cave), and a family of four who was part of the Afanasievo culture (people who lived around 4,500 years ago in South Siberia).

After connecting all of the relationships of the genomes, the researchers reached a total of 13 million connections between each relationship and 27 million common ancestors.

They then were able to locate the estimated locations and time of existence of each of our ancestors by plotting them on the globe. 

After doing this, they noticed that the ancestors who originated the longest were located in the North-East of Sudan, Africa, reaching the conclusion of the study.

This study is a big step up in the history of humanity.

Even though there were theories that humans first originated in Africa, it was the first proper evidence that proved this theory is likely to be true.

However, this finding has helped solidify our understanding of human history and has helped improve the study of human history. 

Additionally, Dr. Yan Wong noted that this way of finding out about the history of humans is also beneficial when trying to find the family tree of other species, whether it is for endangered species or insects that transfer diseases, such as mosquitos or domesticated animals.