Indentured migration and differential gender gene flow: the origin and evolution of the East-Indian community of Limón, Costa Rica.
After the emancipation of African slaves in the Caribbean, the labor void left by out-migrating former slaves was filled by in-migrating indentured servants from prepartition India and China. In some areas of the Caribbean such as Trinidad, Suriname, and Guyana, the East-Indian migrants formed large communities. In this article, we report a study based on mtDNA and Y-chromosomal markers of a small East-Indian community from Limón, Costa Rica. The purpose of the project is to determine the place of origin in the Indian subcontinent of the ancestors of our group and the contributions to its gene pool through gene flow by members of other ethnic groups. Both Y-chromosome and mtDNA suggest that the Indo-Costa Ricans descend from migrants primarily from Central India. While both paternal and maternal markers indicate that this group is overwhelmingly of Indian origin, they also indicate that males and females of African, European, and Amerindian origin contributed to it differently. We discuss our results in the historical context of the virtual extinction of Amerindian Caribbean groups, the forced migration of African slaves to the Caribbean, and the gene flow between Amerindians, Europeans, East-Indians, and Africans that eventually produced the Caribbean's currently diverse gene pool.
Castrì
Loredana
L
Dipartimento di Biologia Evoluzionistica Sperimentale, Area di Antropologia, Università di Bologna, Via Selmi 3, 40126 Bologna, Italy.
Otárola
Flory
F
Blell
Mwenza
M
Ruiz
Ernesto
E
Barrantes
Ramiro
R
Luiselli
Donata
D
Pettener
Davide
D
Madrigal
Lorena
L
D000349:Africa / Q000208:ethnology; D001211:Asia, Western / Q000208:ethnology; D044466:Asian People / Q000235:genetics* / Q000266:history; D041322:Chromosomes, Human, Y; D003364:Costa Rica; D004272:DNA, Mitochondrial; D004641:Emigration and Immigration / Q000266:history*; D005260:Female; D051456:Gene Flow; D014644:Genetic Variation; D006239:Haplotypes; D049671:History, 18th Century; D049672:History, 19th Century; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010802:Phylogeny; D011157:Population Dynamics; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA
D004272:DNA, Mitochondrial