By: TOP500 Team

 What if you researched your family's genealogy, and a mysterious stranger turned out to be an ancestor? A team of scientists who peered back into Europe's murky prehistoric past thousands of years ago had the same surprise. With sophisticated genetic tools, supercomputing simulations and modeling, they traced the origins of modern Europeans to three distinct populations.The international research team’s results are published in the journal Nature.

"Europeans seem to be a mixture of three different ancestral populations," says study co-author Joshua Schraiber, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, in Seattle, US. Schraiber says the results surprised him because the prevailing view among scientists held that only two distinct groups mixed between 7,000 and 8,000 years ago in Europe, as humans first started to adopt agriculture.

Read the full article on iSGTW.