The African Diaspora: Mitochondrial DNA and the Atlantic Slave Trade

Abstract

Between the 15th and 19th centuries ad, the Atlantic slave trade resulted in the forced movement of approximately 13 million people from Africa, mainly to the Americas. Only approximately 11 million survived the passage, and many more died in the early years of captivity. We have studied 481 mitochondrial DNAs (mtDNAs) of recent African ancestry in the Americas and in Eurasia, in an attempt to trace them back to particular regions of Africa. Our results show that mtDNAs in America and Eurasia can, in many cases, be traced to broad geographical regions within Africa, largely in accordance with historical evidence, and raise the possibility that a greater resolution may be possible in the future. However, they also indicate that, at least for the moment, considerable caution is warranted when assessing claims to be able to trace the ancestry of particular lineages to a particular locality within modern-day Africa.

Genome-wide ancestry of 17th-century enslaved Africans from the Caribbean

“…The mtDNAs were assigned to haplogroups L3b1a, L3d1b2, and L2a1f, respectively. Tracing these lineages to particular regions in Africa is challenging because of their pan-continental distribution, which is the result of thousands of years of population movements (e.g., the Bantu migrations) and continued gene flow (20)(21)(22). Nevertheless, we note that haplogroup L3b1a is one of the most common lineages found in the Lake Chad Basin (23).…”

Gender bias in the multiethnic genetic composition of central Argentina

“…Nomenclature of African haplotypes follows Salas et al (2002Salas et al ( , 2004Salas et al ( ), with updates in Č erný et al (2007, Kivisild et al (2004), and Torroni et al (2006). For Native American haplogroups, we use the most updated nomenclature from Bandelt et al (2003) and Kong et al (2006), and for the European profiles, Achilli et al (2005Achilli et al ( , 2004, Loogväli et al (2004), and Sun et al (2006), among others.…”

Reconstructing the phylogeny of African mitochondrial DNA lineages in Slavs

“…1 -4 It has been suggested that African mtDNAs appeared in Europe mostly as a result of the Atlantic slave trade beginning in seventeenth century, with Portugal being the destination point playing predominant role in further dispersal. 3 In addition, the medieval Arab/Berber conquest of Iberia might have also contributed to this process. 5,6 As for eastern Europe, it seems that only African children's traffic from Turkey to Russia at the end of seventeenth century might have played the leading role in African slave trade.…”