Searching for the roots of the first free African American community

Abstract

San Basilio de Palenque is an Afro-descendant community near Cartagena, Colombia, founded in the sixteenth century. The recognition of the historical and cultural importance of Palenque has promoted several studies, namely concerning the African roots of its first inhabitants. To deepen the knowledge of the origin and diversity of the Palenque parental lineages, we analysed a sample of 81 individuals for the entire mtDNA Control Region as well as 92 individuals for 27 Y-STRs and 95 for 51 Y-SNPs. The results confirmed the strong isolation of the Palenque, with some degree of influx of Native American maternal lineages, and a European admixture exclusively mediated by men. Due to the high genetic drift observed, a pairwise FST analysis with available data on African populations proved to be inadequate for determining population affinities. In contrast, when a phylogenetic approach was used, it was possible to infer the phylogeographic origin of some lineages in Palenque. Contradicting previous studies indicating a single African origin, our results evidence parental genetic contributions from widely different African regions.

Ancestry, diversity, and genetics of health-related traits in African-derived communities (quilombos) from Brazil

“…That evident sex-biased admixture pattern observed in the quilombos studied so far agrees with that already reported for other admixed populations from Brazil and populations throughout America, as well as from other European colonized countries in the world (Trovoada et al 2007;Ongaro et al 2019;Korunes et al 2020;Martínez et al 2020). This sex-biased gene flow can be related to the extensive historical records of sexual exploitation of enslaved African and Amerindian women by European men, common during the colonial period (Walsh 1830;Nascimento 2016;Aidoo 2018).…”