MyHeritage eventually hopes to have 3B profiles, including people who’ve passed away. And at that point the family relationship between any 2 people in the world is just a mouse click away.
2012-05-26: I suspect we’ll be able to construct a family tree of all humans who ever lived in the next 50 years. Once you combine billions of complete DNA with data mining, you can predict how long ago any given mutation occurred. Genetics dictates which mutations dominated in what ways. Extract enough DNA from human remains to interpolate. the genographic project is a small step in that direction
The study integrated data on modern and ancient human genomes from eight different databases and included a total of 3609 individual genome sequences from 215 populations. The ancient genomes included samples found across the world with ages ranging from 1 ka to 100 ka. The algorithms predicted where common ancestors must be present in the evolutionary trees to explain the patterns of genetic variation. The resulting network contained 27m ancestors.
After adding location data on these sample genomes, the authors used the network to estimate where the predicted common ancestors had lived. The results successfully recaptured key events in human evolutionary history, including the migration out of Africa.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 