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. 2015 Mar 24;112(12):3669-73.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1421784112. Epub 2015 Mar 9.

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

Hannes Schroeder  1 , María C Ávila-Arcos  2 , Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas  3 , G David Poznik  4 , Marcela Sandoval-Velasco  3 , Meredith L Carpenter  5 , José Víctor Moreno-Mayar  3 , Martin Sikora  2 , Philip L F Johnson  6 , Morten Erik Allentoft  3 , José Alfredo Samaniego  3 , Jay B Haviser  7 , Michael W Dee  8 , Thomas W Stafford Jr  9 , Antonio Salas  10 , Ludovic Orlando  3 , Eske Willerslev  3 , Carlos D Bustamante  5 , M Thomas P Gilbert  11
Affiliations

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

Hannes Schroeder et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .

Abstract

Between 1500 and 1850, more than 12 million enslaved Africans were transported to the New World. The vast majority were shipped from West and West-Central Africa, but their precise origins are largely unknown. We used genome-wide ancient DNA analyses to investigate the genetic origins of three enslaved Africans whose remains were recovered on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin. We trace their origins to distinct subcontinental source populations within Africa, including Bantu-speaking groups from northern Cameroon and non-Bantu speakers living in present-day Nigeria and Ghana. To our knowledge, these findings provide the first direct evidence for the ethnic origins of enslaved Africans, at a time for which historical records are scarce, and demonstrate that genomic data provide another type of record that can shed new light on long-standing historical questions.

Keywords: ancient DNA; genomics; slave trade.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of interest statement: C.D.B. is the founder of IdentifyGenomics, LLC, and is on the Scientific Advisory Boards of Personalis, Inc., and Ancestry.com as well as the Medical Advisory Board of InVitae. M.L.C. is now the Chief Scientific Officer at IdentifyGenomics, LLC. None of this played a role in the design, execution, or interpretation of experiments and results presented here.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Genetic affinities of the Zoutsteeg individuals. (A) D-statistic test results for STM3. Error bars correspond to 3 SEs of the D-statistic. Results for STM1 and STM2 are plotted in SI Appendix, Fig. S18. (B) Sampling locations for the 11 African populations in our reference panel (17). (C) Procrustes-transformed PCA plot of the Zoutsteeg individuals with African reference panel samples. (D) Ancestry proportions for the Zoutsteeg individuals and those of 188 African individuals in the reference panel, as inferred by ADMIXTURE analysis (19).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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