Instead of a single main trunk that branches out, a web has many interconnections that connect family lines in many different ways from a single point. Instead of the model of a “tree” to describe this pattern, many scientists are now using the model of a “web”. Mathematically, this theoretical ancestor was alive only 3,000 to 7,000 years ago, based on DNA data! Compared to the roughly 7 MILLION years that Homo sapiens (humans) have been evolving since our separation from other apes, an MRCA at only 3,000 years ago shows that human genetic lines are tied together in many different ways and that we have remained connected as a single species that entire time.
If the MRCA is found to be more recent, it shows that different groups of humans are closely related.Ĭheck out this simple calculation of humanity’s Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA). If the MRCA is very old, it means human lines have become very separated. The MRCA is a hypothetical person who shares DNA with all living people. To understand this, you must understand the concept of the Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA). Though we are often taught that our family lines are distinct and separate from other people, DNA evidence is proving otherwise. Unfortunately, this depiction of relationships is not accurate. We still call a person’s genealogy a “family tree”. In school, you likely had to study “the tree of life”. Throughout the decades, this “tree of life” idea has caught on. The original "Tree of Life" created by Haeckel When scientists first started thinking about the relationships between humans and with other animals, they came up with something like this: This tree, unlike your personal family tree, will connect all humans on Earth into a single, massive, and very complex family tree. Using this information about relatedness, many DNA companies and organizations are currently working hard to connect all of the individual family trees that have been created into a massive Global Family Tree. The similarities and differences between people can be used to create massive family trees, that go back thousands of years. They can use this to discover a large number of relationships between many different people at once. If you share a segment of DNA with someone, it means that you have a common ancestor with that person.īy analyzing your DNA, researchers can estimate how closely related two different people are. Instead of hand-written notes and scraps of information, DNA data doesn’t lie. When ancestry DNA testing became a reality with the first at-home DNA test kits, researchers began to realize the value of this data in terms of genealogies. This article takes a look at how DNA testing has greatly expanded our ability to track and record genealogies, the idea of a Global Family Tree, why we should call it a Family Web instead, and how you can get involved! Go back a little further, and every person on Earth is eventually part of your family tree. If you take that family tree and go one generation up, everything is multiplied by the number of people in that generation! So, when you really start looking back into history you likely have MILLIONS or HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of people in your family tree. My family tree, going back to my great-great-grandparents, would contain several hundred (maybe even thousands) of other people. My grandfather had 12 siblings, and my grandmother had 10 siblings. My grandparents come from super large families. Plus, this only takes the genealogy back to roughly the year 1900, only 120 years ago. And that is if each child only had 2 children. If your Great-great-grandparents had two children, and each of these people got married and had two children, and so-on all the way down to you, there would be at least 46 people in this family tree. However, even the best of these genealogies can only show so many generations before the amount of information becomes untenable. For centuries, people have been recording their family history into well-researched genealogies.
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