If we trace the family tree far enough back, we will find that our ancestors originated elsewhere thousands of years ago.
Somewhere in the desert in north-eastern Sudan, not far from the Nile River, according to a rather ambitious new analysis by researchers at the University of Oxford's Big Data Institute, is likely the ancestral home of all humans living today.
"Basically, we reconstructed the genomes of our ancestors and used them to form an extensive network of relationships," explained Dr. Anthony Wilder Wohns, lead author of the study published in Science, quoted from IFL Science.
"We can then estimate when and where these ancestors lived," said Wohns.
"We have basically built a big family tree, a pedigree for all of humanity," said evolutionary geneticist and lead author of the study Dr Yan Wong.
"This genealogy allows us to see how each person's genetic sequence relates to one another, across all points of the genome," he continued.
Using data from eight different human genome databases, the researchers were able to create a network of nearly 27 million ancestors. The samples came from not only modern humans, but also ancient humans who lived around the world between thousands and hundreds of thousands of years ago.
State-of-the-art algorithms are used to scan the data for patterns of genetic variation and predict where a common ancestor will appear in the family tree to explain them.
"Research modeling history produces all the genetic variation that we find in humans today, exactly as we can," explains Wong.
The result is a compelling visual representation of human movements and migrations throughout history. But the researchers weren't done here. As more data becomes available, they intend to continue to add to and improve this genealogy map. Thanks to the efficiency of their method, they still have room for millions of additional genomic samples.
"This research lays the foundation for the next generation of DNA sequencing," said Wong. "As the quality of the genome sequences from modern and ancient DNA samples improves, genealogical trees will become more accurate and eventually we will be able to produce one unified map that describes the ancestry of all the human genetic variation we see today," he explained.
And if that wasn't ambitious enough, according to Wohns, the research team could go even further.
"Although humans are the focus of this research, the methods used apply to most living things, from orangutans to bacteria," he said.
"This could be very useful in medical genetics, in separating the true associations between genetic regions and disease from the 'false' relationships that arise from our shared ancestral history," he concluded.