Evolutionary and Political Economic Influences On Biological Diversity in African Americans

Abstract

African American are among the most biologically diverse groups in the world, deriving the bulk their genetic inheritance from Africa, the most tropical of the world's continents, the continent regarded as the ancestral homeland of the genus Homo, the geographical region of longest human habitation, and the point of origin for the oldest anatomically modem human groups. Yet African American biological variation is also a product of the great Atlantic Diaspora, a movement that was initiated with the social and economic disruptions in Africa preceding the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved African peoples and includes the forced march of prisoners of war to the sea for transport, the dynamics of the horrific Middle Passage and the seasoning process, and the biological and biocultural readjustments of Africans to enslavement in the Americas. African American human biology has been significantly shaped by selective pressures emanating from the unique and particularly adverse social, economic, and political conditions of this historical lifeworld. These selective constraints have molded the pronounced inherent variation of the ancestral African gene pool, which has also been modified by varying degrees of gene flow (i.e., admixture)