Charting the ancestry of African Americans.
The Atlantic slave trade promoted by West European empires (15th-19th centuries) forcibly moved at least 11 million people from Africa, including about one-third from west-central Africa, to European and American destinations. The mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genome has retained an imprint of this process, but previous analyses lacked west-central African data. Here, we make use of an African database of 4,860 mtDNAs, which include 948 mtDNA sequences from west-central Africa and a further 154 from the southwest, and compare these for the first time with a publicly available database of 1,148 African Americans from the United States that contains 1,053 mtDNAs of sub-Saharan ancestry. We show that >55% of the U.S. lineages have a West African ancestry, with <41% coming from west-central or southwestern Africa. These results are remarkably similar to the most up-to-date analyses of the historical record.
Salas
Antonio
A
Unidade de Xenetica, Instituto de Medicina Legal, Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain. apimlase@usc.es
Carracedo
Angel
A
Richards
Martin
M
Macaulay
Vincent
V
D001741:Black or African American / Q000235:genetics*; D004272:DNA, Mitochondrial / Q000235:genetics; D004641:Emigration and Immigration; D005828:Genetics, Population; D006801:Humans
D004272:DNA, Mitochondrial