Europeans are One Big Family Closely Related for the Past 1000 Years

DNA analyses of people across the European continent suggest that right from Ireland to the Balkans, Europeans are basically one big family closely related to one another for the past thousand years, according to a study published in the journal PLoS Biology.

The study was conducted by Graham Coop, a professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis, along with co-author Peter Ralph, now a professor at the University of Southern California.

"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, co-author of the study, said in a news release. "This was predicted in theory over a decade ago, and we now have concrete evidence from DNA data."

Coop suspects that such a kind of close kinship is most likely to exist in other parts of the world as well.

To prove their hypothesis, researchers studied the relatedness among Europeans in recent history (3,000 years ago). They then compared the genetic sequences from more than 2,000 different people by focusing on the Population Reference Sample (POPRES) database.

On analyzing the genetic sequence, they noticed that the farther two people lived, the smaller was their genetic relatedness. Even if two people lived at a distance of 2,000 miles such as in the U.K. and Turkey, they were more likely to be related to one another's ancestors from a thousand years ago.

According to Ralph, slight local distinctions which likely mark demographic shifts and historic migrations stand on the top of the underlying kinship. Barriers like mountain ranges and linguistic disparity also lower the relatedness among regions, but these differences are negligible.

Researchers also rely on archaeology and linguistics to study about how the culture and societies drifted and evolved.

"These studies need to proceed hand in hand, to form a much fuller picture of history," Coop said.