All tagged Ancestry Testing
DNA tests can be a powerful tool to help you look into the past and see where your family is from. Readouts from these tests will tell you about your genetic ancestry, but what about your culture?
When we think of human history, we often picture a linear progression where primitive beings exist for a time, only to give way as more sophisticated humans develop. This view isn’t necessarily wrong, but it does gloss over some pretty incredible moments in our history—including the evolution of the hobbits.
This week, the world learned about a different kind of zombie—one that’s not made of bones or flesh. This kind of zombie is made of DNA, and it may be playing an important role in the evolution of elephants. It could also be helping humans grow large brains.
Those who knew Dr. Cavalli-Sforza describe him as an incredibly impactful mentor, a positive personality, and perhaps one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century. He inspired people to take an interest in population genetics and understand how human diversity came to be.
Protruding from the desolate landscape are the world’s oldest trees—bristlecone pine trees—at least one of which is more than 5,000 years old. Few things on Earth have transcended time like this. But buried in the recesses of our cells sits a biomolecular code that’s been around for much, much longer: DNA.
In its most superficial viewing, our ancestry can seem pretty straightforward, like the sun’s combined light. But, when we look a little harder, you find that everyone’s genetic history is a rich tapestry of different peoples and cultures.
Genetic studies have found signs of a mysterious human group that coexisted with early Homo sapiens in Africa and left a genetic signature that’s persisted in the DNA of modern Africans. Find out more about ancient humans in Africa and what geneticists are studying.
What if we want to know what life was like before written text, before the beginning of modern oral history? How can we see the world that existed more than 50,000 years ago? For this, we turn to the stories contained within our DNA.
Just this month, scientists announced the sequencing of an ancient human hybrid whose DNA was half Neanderthal and half Denisovan. Find out what it means for our understanding of our own species.
Neanderthals and Denisovans are our ancient relatives. Archeological data indicates that archaic humans evolved into Neanderthals and Denisovans in the Eurasian continent over hundreds of thousands of years before the anatomically modern man—our most immediate ancestors—left Africa.
It would be easy to assume that one person’s genetic ancestry results can tell a family’s whole story. But that’s not exactly true.
In many cases, people seek out ancestry testing to learn about family history. But that’s not all that’s hidden away in your DNA—important moments in the history of our species have left lasting marks on our DNA, some of which may still be affecting us today. Here's how to explore this aspect of your history.
Where did fruit flies come from? Turns out the answer to this question can tell us a whole lot more than just the history of the fly.