Stories

Browse through our blog and find out more about human ancestry and diversity as well as personal insights and expert opinions. Our research-based stories will allow you to learn more about history, genetics, and culture in the scope of human diversity.

The genetic screening behind the ancestry tests

Ancestry testing brings together interests in family history and genetics, a trend that is here to stay. But few people understand how ancestry testing works. In this article, we explain how a small sample of saliva can give us immense information about an individual's genetic history and how the size of databases can change details about our ancestry. Nevertheless, genetics is only a small piece of the puzzle of who we are.

The idea behind this project

It is extremely rare that a call for research projects allows us to apply our expertise in addressing a global symbolic historical moment: the circumnavigation by Fernão Magalhães’s crew. For human population geneticists, that 500-year-old expedition was amazing in enabling the first contact between so many diverse human populations. And that was the mote we followed to launch our project.