Haplofield

1Sources and licences#

Haplofield draws two published datasets and one outline. The people, their sites and their dates come from the Allen Ancient DNA Resource (AADR), the curated compilation of published ancient-genome metadata, released under CC0. The connections come from ancIBD, a published set of DNA segments shared between pairs of ancient individuals, identical by descent, released under CC BY 4.0.

The two are joined on the individual identifier both publish. Nothing is added at the join: a person with a site and a date but no shared segment stays a faint dot; a shared segment whose two people have no published site is not drawn.

The coastline under the space is Natural Earth, public domain. It is bearings, not data — no dot is placed by it.

The published scene is content-addressed: build dd2e25d7, published 2026-09-14. A new export is a new build with a new address, so a shared link always opens the scene it was shared from.

2What the space holds#

9,158 people carry a published site and are drawn. 4,104 of them appear in the pair file with at least one shared segment; between them run 776,654 segments, each a stretch of DNA two people inherited from a common ancestor.

Dates run up to 185,000 years before present; the median person lived 2,430 years ago. Each date is the published estimate with its published uncertainty — on average ±89 years — drawn as a bar along the time axis, never as a second point.

Sex, where the source records it, and the coarse length class of each connection are carried as published. The scene declares its own counts and ranges; the viewer draws what the scene declares and hardcodes nothing about the data.

3Positions are observed, never inferred#

Every dot sits at three published coordinates: the longitude and latitude of the site where the person was found, and the date they lived. Nothing is projected, embedded, averaged or imputed. A person without a published site is not drawn anywhere — there is no guessed position.

This is the one rule the whole space rests on. Position is archaeology — where a body was found, when it was buried. The dial is genetics — how much DNA two people share. The two are independent, so turning the dial can recolour the space but can never move a dot: the landmarks hold by construction, not by discipline.

Longitude and latitude are drawn on an equirectangular floor at one scale, so the coastline keeps its shape. Time is drawn on the vertical axis by rank, so the many recent people and the few very old ones both have room; the axis labels state that scale.

4What the dial does#

The dial is a threshold: the minimum amount of shared DNA, measured in centimorgans (cM), for two people to count as connected. Closer relatives share longer stretches, so a higher setting keeps only the closest links.

Where it bites is a property of the data, not a design choice. Below about 41.5 cM nearly every connected person sits in one group — a single undifferentiated haze. Between 41.5 and 87 cM that group collapses into hundreds of separate ones. Above it, the groups are people buried in the same place within a century or two of each other: households, cemeteries, people who knew each other.

The still figures on the home page and the landing are drawn at 60 cM, inside that band, with one person selected and their connections drawn down to 20 cM — the view you get by pointing at any person in the space. Every setting of the dial is reachable there, and the address bar records it, so a view can be shared exactly.

5What a colour means#

At any setting, a group is a connected component of the graph: the people you can reach from one another by following connections at or above the threshold. Each group takes a stable colour; the single largest group is drawn grey, so the many small groups read against it; people with no connection at that setting stay faint but present.

A group is a statement about shared segments and nothing more. It is not a population, a culture, an ethnicity or a lineage, and its colour carries no meaning beyond telling it apart from its neighbours.

6What Haplofield cannot tell you#

The space is only as complete as the record it draws. Its limits are the record's limits, plus the choices named above:

• Coverage follows excavation and sequencing, not past population. A dense region is one that has been studied; an empty one may simply not have been.
• Dates are the published estimates, with an average uncertainty of ±89 years and much more for some individuals; a bar is drawn for each, but two people whose bars overlap are not thereby contemporaries.
• A threshold is a choice. The band where the space reorganises is measured, but no single setting is the correct one.
• A group is a set of shared segments. It says nothing about who a person was, what language they spoke or what they called themselves.
• Haplofield makes no new biological claim. It re-plots published data under a published method; anything it appears to show that is not in the sources is an artefact of the view.
• One published scene at a time. Build dd2e25d7 is the current one; earlier builds are not kept online.