23andMe Launches New Feature Connecting Customers to Historical Individuals from Hundreds and Even Thousands of Years Ago - Seite 2

23andMe plans to add additional historical genomes to the Historical Matches feature over time, offering 23andMe+ Premium and Total Health members more opportunities to connect their stories to past epochs.

To create this new feature and connect members to Historical Matches, 23andMe identifies segments of DNA that individuals share with the genetic sequences of historical individuals. The feature relies on publicly available data, scientific publications, and the 23andMe relative matching technology to link to these historical individuals. Most members will have a match to one or more of these individuals, offering them a connection to specific individuals from a particular time in history.

While most matches reveal very distant connections, some matches may be closer. Some of these genomes are from individuals who lived thousands of years ago, while others are just a few centuries old. Almost all are relatively anonymous, except one of the more recent figures, Beethoven, who died in 1827. The other historical genomes are from unnamed individuals who were part of important historical moments. 23andMe has collected them into nine groups.

The Viking Age — Seafaring people of Scandinavia, the Vikings made their indelible mark between the 8th and 11th centuries, called the Viking Age.

Catoctin Furnace Ironworkers — The Catoctin Furnace Iron Workers were enslaved and freed African American laborers who toiled at an iron furnace in Maryland between the 18th and 19th centuries. The site, one of the earliest industrial sites in the United States, produced iron goods, including making the shells fired during the siege of Yorktown and ammunition for the Continental Army.

Iron Age Taiwan — The Iron Age in Taiwan refers to a period when the indigenous Atayal people began to use metals like bronze, iron, and silver.

The Ancient Eurasian Steppe — The Eurasian Steppe encompasses the massive grasslands and plains stretching from modern-day Hungary and Romania to Mongolia and China. It also was a crossroad for human migration and a hub for the spread of the Indo-European language.

The First Peoples of the Caribbean — This group includes indigenous people of the Caribbean who lived in the region before colonization, between about 1,000 BCE and about 1,500 CE, or just as Spanish explorers first encountered these communities.

The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia — Most South Asian populations today descend from a mixture of two ancient populations that lived around 4,000 years ago, whom scientists call "Ancestral South Indians" and "Ancestral North Indians". Ancestral South Indians were also the product of a mixture between two genetically distinct groups related to ancient Iranian farmers and southern Asian hunter-gatherers, which likely occurred around 2,000 BCE. Ancestral North Indians were descendants of pastoralists (herders) who lived in the eastern part of the Eurasian Steppe during the Bronze Age.