Europe is one big family

Continent shares common ancestry about 30 generations ago

The branches of Europe’s family tree converge remarkably recently in the continent’s history — around the time of the Norman conquest and the Vikings’ transatlantic voyages.

Virtually every person living in Europe today shares a common set of ancestors that lived about 1,000 years ago, Peter Ralph and Graham Coop of the University of California, Davis report May 7 in PLOS Biology.