Genes Show One Big European Family

May 7, 2013 — From Ireland to the Balkans, Europeans are basically one big family, closely related to one another for the past thousand years, according to a new study of the DNA of people from across the continent.

A modern-day person living in the United Kingdom shares ancestors with people across the Europe. These maps show where the distant cousins of modern-day people in the UK live, at three different levels of relatedness (recent on top, older on the bottom). Bigger circles mean more ancestors, and numbers give average number of shared genetic ancestors. The further back in time, the more widespread the shared ancestors. (Credit: Peter Ralph/USC and Graham Coop/UC Davis.)