Searching for the roots of the first free African American community

Beatriz Martínez,Masinda Nguidi,Elizeu F Carvalho,Filipa Simão,Javier Marrugo,Leonor Gusmão,Verónica Gomes,Antonio Amorim

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-77608-8

Abstract

San Basilio de Palenque is an Afro-descendant community near Cartagena, Colombia, founded in the sixteenth century. The recognition of the historical and cultural importance of Palenque has promoted several studies, namely concerning the African roots of its first inhabitants. To deepen the knowledge of the origin and diversity of the Palenque parental lineages, we analysed a sample of 81 individuals for the entire mtDNA Control Region as well as 92 individuals for 27 Y-STRs and 95 for 51 Y-SNPs. The results confirmed the strong isolation of the Palenque, with some degree of influx of Native American maternal lineages, and a European admixture exclusively mediated by men. Due to the high genetic drift observed, a pairwise FST analysis with available data on African populations proved to be inadequate for determining population affinities. In contrast, when a phylogenetic approach was used, it was possible to infer the phylogeographic origin of some lineages in Palenque. Contradicting previous studies indicating a single African origin, our results evidence parental genetic contributions from widely different African regions.

Highlights

San Basilio de Palenque is an Afro-descendant community near Cartagena, Colombia, founded in the sixteenth century
San Basilio de Palenque is a small town near Cartagena, Colombia, founded by runaway slaves (Supplementary Fig. S1)
At the end of the sixteenth century, African slaves started to escape from the coastal city of Cartagena to take refuge in the nearby region of Montes de María, establishing, the foundations of the town of San Basilio de Palenque

Summary

Introduction

San Basilio de Palenque is an Afro-descendant community near Cartagena, Colombia, founded in the sixteenth century. Palenque preserves the ethnic conscience and cultural traits of African roots such as the social organisation, complex funeral rituals, and traditional medical practices, among others[6] It is the only African American population speaking a Creole language with a Spanish lexical base[5,7]. Given the high diversity of slaves arriving in Cartagena, one might suppose that several ethnic groups would be behind the foundation of Palenque This theory has been questioned by linguistic and anthropological evidence, pointing to the region between Congo and Angola (the ancient Kingdom of Kongo) as the origin of the first habitants of Palenque[2,3], with an almost exclusive contribution from a single Bantu ethnic group, the Bakongo, speakers of Kikongo[5]

Methods

Results

Conclusion