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.
The study, co-authored by Graham Coop, a professor of
evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis, is published May
7 in the journal PLoS Biology.
"What’s remarkable about this is how closely everyone
is related to each other. On a genealogical level, everyone in Europe traces
back to nearly the same set of ancestors only a thousand years ago," Coop
said.