And Aniv Erlich has been a white hat hacker and geneticist at Columbia University (USA), and now works for a genealogy company. This unusual career path has led to the creation of a family tree of 13 million people that has been published in the journal Science: the largest family tree of mankind.
The researchers downloaded 86 million public profiles from Geni.com, a web platform where you can discover your origins by uploading your personal data to build your own family tree. With all this volume of data, scientists created the largest family tree the world has ever seen, detailing the lives of approximately 13 million people, going back an average of 11 generations. The numbers are staggering, but what this massive block of family history reveals about our past is truly impressive.
Using the data from the 86 million publicly available profiles, they evaluated them for strange details, such as people who were both parents and children of someone else. In case the data suffered heavily from certain biases, such as leaning towards particular socioeconomic groups, they also compared a section of the data with details of around 80,000 death certificates from the Vermont (US) Department of Health.
In the end, they had enough reliable data to create 5.3 million family trees, with the largest of them representing a whole huge interlocking garden encompassing 13 million people who lived between 1650 and 2000.
These vast networks of human history were made up primarily of individuals from Europe and North America , detailing everything from longevity patterns and intermarriage to migration and genetic relationships.
A data set as large as this has only been made possible by the efforts of many people who put hours into work that has required a lot of dedication.
“Through the hard work of many genealogists curious about their family history, we collaborated on a huge family tree and came up with something unique,” says MyHeritage geneticist and computer scientist Yaniv Erlich. “We hope that this data set can be useful for scientists investigating other topics.”
Fun facts from the family tree
In demographics, women tend to move more often than men. But men traveled longer distances on average, often ending up in entirely new countries.
“One possible explanation is that men tend to stay in their hometown because of better economic opportunities – maybe a store they inherited or some land,” Erlich explains. The point is that men travel less but, when they do, they travel significantly further than women.
Advances in transportation technology also coincided with longer migrations. Thus, people born before 1800 tended to find a partner within a radius of 8 kilometers, in 1850 the average rose to a radius of 19 kilometers and within a radius of 100 kilometers already in 1950. The difficulty of finding love.
But there was an interesting twist in the data; B efore 1850, for example, marry a family was common (third or fourth cousin cousin).
The dataset is available for academic research through FamiLinx.org, a website created by Erlich and his colleagues.
Reference: J. Kaplanis el al., “Quantitative analysis of population-scale family trees with millions of relatives,” Science (2017). science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi… 1126 / science.aam9309
