Sad reminder – the genetic impact of the African slave trade

An insightful, terribly sad reminder of the horror. Article from the BBC & the study was through the consumer genetics company 23andMe. I’ve excerpted below the link; you need to hit the link for the rest.

Steven Micheletti, a population geneticist at 23andMe told AFP news agency that the aim was to compare the genetic results with the manifests of slave ships “to see how they agreed and how they disagree”. While much of their findings agreed with historical documentation about where people were taken from in Africa and where they were enslaved in the Americas, “in some cases, we see that they disagree, quite strikingly”, he added.

The study found, in line with the major slave route, that most Americans of African descent have roots in territories now located in Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

What was surprising was the over-representation of Nigerian ancestry in the US and Latin America when compared with the recorded number of enslaved people from that region.

Researchers say this can be explained by the “intercolonial trade that occurred primarily between 1619 and 1807”.

Researchers said a strong bias towards African female contributions in the gene pool – even though the majority of slaves were male – could be attributed to “the rape of enslaved African women by slave owners and other sexual exploitation”.

In Latin America, up to 17 African women for every African man contributed to the gene pool. Researchers put this down in part to a policy of “branqueamento”, racial whitening, in a number of countries, which actively encouraged the immigration of European men “with the intention to dilute African ancestry through reproduction”.

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The study highlighted the “practice of coercing enslaved people to having children as a means of maintaining an enslaved workforce nearing the abolition of the transatlantic trade”. In the US, women were often promised freedom in return for reproducing and racist policies opposed the mixing of different races, researchers note.