If there is one thing you can say about families, it is the larger the better. And by looking at genetic data of people from Ireland to the Balkans, researchers have found that Europeans are one big family, and have been for the past thousand years. Graham Coop, a professor of evolution and ecology at UCDavis, and Peter Ralph, a professor at University of Southern California (USC), published a recent study of the genetics of Europeans in the May 7 issue of the journal PLOS Biology. The duo set out to study the relatedness among Europeans over the past 3,000 years. Using information from the Population Reference Sample (POPRES) database, Coop and Ralph compared genetic sequences of more than 2,000 individuals. They found that the degree of genetic relatedness, as expected, was smaller the farther apart people live from one another. However, even if two individuals lived 2,000 miles apart, the researchers found they would likely be related to all of one another’s ancestors from a thousand years ago. “What’s remarkable about this is how closely everyone is related to each other. On a genealogical level, everyone in Europe traces back to nearly the same set of ancestors only a thousand years ago,” Coop said in a statement. “This was predicted in theory over a decade ago, and we now have concrete evidence from DNA data.” The duo also found subtle regional variations in the underlying kinship of Europeans. Barriers such as mountain ranges and linguistic differences have slightly reduced relatedness in some regions. Coop noted, however, that these are relatively small differences. By just going back a few thousand years, it can be shown through genetics that everyone in Europe is related to everyone else. “The overall picture is that everybody is related, and we are looking at only subtle differences between regions,” said Coop.
