If we think of our world as being made up of different colors of soup – representing different populations – it is easy to visualize how genetic admixture occurs. If a population from the blue soup region mixes with a population from the red soup region their offspring would appear as a purple soup.

The more genetic admixture that takes place, the more different colors of soup are introduced, which makes it increasingly difficult to locate your DNA’s ancestry using traditional tools like Spatial Ancestry analysis (SPA), which has an accuracy level of less than 2 percent.

What we have discovered here at the University of Sheffield is a way to find not where you were born – as you have that information on your passport – but where your DNA was formed up to 1,000 years ago by modelling these admixture processes.

What is remarkable is that, we can do this so accurately that we can locate the village where your ancestors lived hundreds and hundreds of years ago – until now this has never been possible.