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Most people have questioned where their ancestors came and now a new tool dubbed a DNA 'satnav' could answer the question more accurately than ever before.

The Geographic Population Structure (GPS) tool is able to locate the village where a person's ancestors lived 1,000 years ago.

Scientists behind the technology believe it could have enormous implications for life-saving personalised medical treatments.

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Hoem sweet home: The Geographic Population Structure (GPS) tool (pictured) can locate the village where your ancestors lived 1,000 years ago and the scientists behind the technology think it could have big implications for life-saving personalised medical treatments

Previous tools could only locate the whereabouts of ancestors within 434miles (700km) which in Europe can be two countries away.

But the new technology developed by Dr Eran Elhaik from the University of Sheffield's Department of Animal and Plant Sciences and Dr Tatiana Tatarinova from the University of Southern California, is 98 per cent successful in locating people to the geographic region of their ancestors – even down to their village of origin.

Knowing the location that gene pools were mixed has large implications for personalised medicine and for the study of populations whose ancestral origins are under debate - such as African Americans, Roma gypsies and European Jews, they said.

Genetic admixture occurs when individuals from two or more previously separated populations begin interbreeding and it results in the creation of new gene pools that represent the mixture of the founder gene pool.

Such processes are extremely common in history during migrations and invasions such as when the Vikings invaded Britain in the 11th Century.

The new technology claims to be 98 per cent successful in locating people to the geographic region of their ancestors (illustrated) - down to their village of origin

Some of them formed a new Viking-Anglo-Saxon gene pool, but others married other Vikings and maintained their original gene pool, allowing GPS to trace their Scandinavian origins.

'If we think of our world as being made up of different colours of soup - representing different populations - it is easy to visualise how genetic admixture occurs,' Dr Elhaik said.

'If a population from the blue soup region mixes with a population from the red soup region their off-springs would appear as a purple soup.

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

He explained that the new technology models the admixture processes to pinpoint where a person's DNA was formed 1,000 years ago and is more accurate than technology used by services like 23andme or ancestry.com.

 

DNA 'Sat Nav' can pinpoint the village your ancestors lived in

Viking heritage: Genetic admixture occurs when individuals from two or more previously separated populations begin interbreeding and it results in the creation of new gene pools that represent the mixture of the founder gene pool. Such processes are common in history during migrations and invasions such as when the Vikings invaded Britain in the 11th Century (illustrated)

'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.'

To demonstrate the accuracy of GPS, they analysed data from 10 villages in Sardinia and over 20 islands in Oceania.

The researchers were able to link a quarter of the residents in Sardinia directly to their home village and most of the remaining residents within 31miles (50km) of their village. In the Oceania sample, almost 90 per cent of islanders were linked to their island.

Dr Elhaik said: 'This is a significant improvement compared to the alternative SPA tool that placed Oceanians in India.'

'This technique also means that we can no longer easily classify people's ethnic identities with one single label.

'It is impossible for any of us to tick one box on a form such as White British or African as we are much complex models with our own unique identities. The notion of races is simply not plausible.'

The technology is now available to the public via a company called Prosapia Genetics and tracing ancestors and genealogy is now thought to be the most popular pastime in the U.S. where an estimated one million people already have their DNA (illustrated) genotyped

The technology is now available to the public via a company called Prosapia Genetics and tracing ancestors and genealogy is now thought to be the most popular pastime in the U.S. where an estimated one million people already have their DNA genotyped.

Dr Tatarinova said: 'We were surprised by the simplicity and precision of this method. People in a given geographical area are more likely to have similar genetics.

'When they also have genetic traits typically found in other, distant regions, the geographical origin of those traits is generally the closest location where those traits can be found.'

According to the researchers, in ethnically-diverse regions like the UK or US, where many people know only a few generations of their descendants, this kind of screening has huge, important medical implications.

Discovery of a certain genotype might indicate the potential for a genetic disease and suggest that diagnostic testing be done. 

As scientists learn more about personalised medicine, there is evidence that specific genotypes respond differently to medications - making this information potentially useful when selecting the most effective therapy and appropriate dosage, the researchers said.