A family tree representing 6,000 people (green dots) and their marital links (red dots).COLUMBIA UNIVERSITYDownloading data from the genealogy site Geni.com, researchers have created a ginormous family tree that connects 13 million people by blood or marriage. The results reveal when, and possibly why, marrying a cousin became taboo as well as how genes influence length of life and how humans moved around the world for hundreds of years.
“You can harness the hard work of so many people around the globe just documenting their own family history, and learn something about humanity,” Yaniv Erlich, chief science officer of MyHeritage, the parent company of Geni.com, and coauthor of the paper, tells The New York Times.
Combining all of the data, the team was able to connect individuals, most of European descent, across 11 generations stretching back five centuries. The tree includes population geneticist Sewall Wright and actor Kevin Bacon. A paper describing the results appeared yesterday (March 1) in Science.
“This study is an impressive and clever use of crowdsourcing data to address a number of interesting scientific questions,” geneticist Peter Visscher of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, who was not involved ...
