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A new study by researchers at the consumer genetics company 23andMe has paired tens of thousands of genetic profiles with detailed historical records to trace the ancestry of modern-day African Americans back through the transatlantic slave trade.
The results, published Thursday (July 23) in The American Journal of Human Genetics, confirm some of what is known about where people in Africa were taken from and where they disembarked in the Americas, but they also yield some new insights. Finding some regions overrepresented among African Americans’ ancestry sheds light on secondary slave trading, while the underrepresentation of other African groups points to regional differences in the treatment of slaves. The findings also identify a sex bias in which women contributed significantly more to the gene pool of modern-day African Americans than enslaved men did.
“For millions of people in the Americas, the story of the transatlantic slave ...
