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![]() ![]() The human familyMany of us trace our ancestry to one or two regions of the world and believe that our closest relationship to an individual from another continent may date back to the time that humans first left Africa. New data, from genetic and mathematical analysis of biparental rather than the more commonly studied uniparental mode of descent, show that we may be much more closely related than we think. A single individual living as recently as 1000 to 2000 BC was an ancestor of all people on the Earth today. And a few thousand years before that, everyone in the world was either an ancestor of all people living today or of no-one. These findings could dramatically alter how we think about networks of ancestry and about human relatedness.
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© 2004 Nature Publishing Group |