The Human Genome Contains a Million Years Worth of Population Data
July 14th, 2011Via: io9:
Our genes don’t just help determine who we are — they also preserve an incredibly ancient record of who our ancestors were. Our genomes can actually reveal human population sizes dating all the way back to before humans even existed.
Richard Durbin of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Heng Li of the Broad Institute examined the handful of complete human genome sequences. Specifically, they examined how the differences between how particular genes from mothers and fathers were expressed — many differences in gene expression would suggest the family lines diverged a long time ago, while relatively few differences would indicate the two were closely related in the recent past.
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