European Genetic Trees Share Many Recent Branches

The arguments for or against the move notwithstanding, back some time ago European Countries set out to corral each other into a economics-based family called the European Union.

Now, a United States research team from California has discovered just how close a family Europeans actually are.

Samples of DNA from people born and raised in different parts of the continent found that most had common ancestors living as recently as 1,000 years ago, according to a report by the Associated Press.

The results confirm decade-old mathematical models, but will likely prove unsettling, ifc not a surprise, to Europeans used to thinking of ancient nations composed of distinct ethnic groups such as Germans, Spaniards or Serbs.

"What's remarkable about this is how closely everyone is related to each other," said Graham Coop of the University of California, Davis, who co-wrote the study published May 7 in the journal PLoS Biology.

Coop and fellow author Peter Ralph of the University of Southern California used a database that contained more than 2,250 genetic samples to look for shared DNA segments.

The two scientists found that though common genetic ancestors were indeed more frequent the closer people lived to one another, even individuals living, say, 2,000 miles apart had identical sections of DNA that could be traced back to about the Middle Ages.

The data suggest there was a steady flow of genetic material between countries as far apart as Turkey and Britain, or Poland and Portugal --- even after the great population movements of the first millennium, such as the Saxon and Viking invasions of Britain or the westward migration of the Huns and Slavic peoples.

"The analysis is pretty convincing. It comes partly from the enormous number of ancestors each one of us have," said Mark A. Jobling, a professor of genetics at the University of Leicester, England, who wasn't involved in the study.

Since the number of ancestors each person has more or less doubles with every new generation, "we don't have to go too far back to find someone who features in all of our family trees," he said.

Jobling cited a scientific paper published in 2004 that predicted every person on the planet shares ancestors who lived about 4,000 years ago.

For some still-unknown reasons, Italians and Spaniards appear to be less closely related than most other Europeans to people elsewhere on the continent.

Experts say the study's findings still need to be compared with what is known about population movements in Europe and elsewhere from other fields of study.

Coop and Ralph said the findings could help change the way Europeans think about their continental neighbors.

"The basic idea that we're all related much more recently than one might think...is not widely appreciated, and still quite surprising to many people, even scientists working in population genetics, including ourselves," they said in an email to the Associated Press. "The fact that we share all our ancestors from a time period where we recognize various ethnic identities also points at how we are like a family -- we have our differences, but are all closely related."