Genetic data gives a window into the slave trade

Ars Technica » Scientific Method 2015-03-15

Between 1500 and 1850, over twelve million Africans were brought, shackled, to the New Word to grow labor-intensive crops like sugar, cotton, tobacco, and rice. Historical records often contain the slave ships' date of departure, African port of embarkation, and final destination, but little information on the people they carried. Beyond origins in West-Central Africa, it has been difficult to know their ethnic or geographic origins.

In 2010, construction work in Saint Martin unearthed the remains of two men and one woman. Skeletal analysis of the "Zoutsteeg Three"—named for the area in which they were found—indicated that they were African, and radiocarbon dating indicated that they were buried in the late sixteen hundreds. Although the DNA in the remains was poorly preserved in the tropical Caribbean climate, researchers were able to glean enough genome-wide data to trace their origins to different regions in Africa.

DNA was extracted from their tooth roots, sequenced, and compared to that in reference genomes collected from eleven different modern West African populations. One of the men seemed to come from the Bamoun, a Bantu-speaking group in northern Cameroon, and the other two slaves came from non-Bantu speaking groups in the region of Nigeria and Ghana. Of course, migrations have taken place within Africa in the mean time; these modern populations may not be the same as the populations that lived in these locations during the Atlantic slave trade.

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