Y Chromosome Lineages in Men of West African Descent

Jada Benn Torres,Shomarka O Y Keita,Menahem B Doura,Rick A Kittles,Carles Lalueza-Fox

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0029687

Jada Benn Torres, Shomarka O Y Keita + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0029687

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Abstract

The early African experience in the Americas is marked by the transatlantic slave trade from ∼1619 to 1850 and the rise of the plantation system. The origins of enslaved Africans were largely dependent on European preferences as well as the availability of potential laborers within Africa. Rice production was a key industry of many colonial South Carolina low country plantations. Accordingly, rice plantations owners within South Carolina often requested enslaved Africans from the so-called “Grain Coast” of western Africa (Senegal to Sierra Leone). Studies on the African origins of the enslaved within other regions of the Americas have been limited. To address the issue of origins of people of African descent within the Americas and understand more about the genetic heterogeneity present within Africa and the African Diaspora, we typed Y chromosome specific markers in 1,319 men consisting of 508 west and central Africans (from 12 populations), 188 Caribbeans (from 2 islands), 532 African Americans (AAs from Washington, DC and Columbia, SC), and 91 European Americans. Principal component and admixture analyses provide support for significant Grain Coast ancestry among African American men in South Carolina. AA men from DC and the Caribbean showed a closer affinity to populations from the Bight of Biafra. Furthermore, 30–40% of the paternal lineages in African descent populations in the Americas are of European ancestry. Diverse west African ancestries and sex-biased gene flow from EAs has contributed greatly to the genetic heterogeneity of African populations throughout the Americas and has significant implications for gene mapping efforts in these populations.

Highlights

The European colonization of the Americas used labor from west and west central Africa, initially in the U.S as indentured servants and later enslaved
Eight Y chromosome specific short tandem repeats (YSTRs) loci, DYS287 (YAP), and M89 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) were typed in 1,319 individuals from the 17 distinct populations found within the Americas, west and west central Africa in order to examine paternal lineages in men of African descent
Considering the standard deviation, the average mean pairwise differences (MPD) for the African Americans and African Caribbean populations is higher than the average MPD for the African and European populations

Summary

Introduction

The European colonization of the Americas used labor from west and west central Africa, initially in the U.S as indentured servants and later enslaved. The exact number is unknown and highly contested, it is estimated by some historians that between 8 to 12 million Africans were brought to the Americas in the transatlantic slave trade. Of this total, the vast majority were sold to European colonies in Latin America, only 4.5% of the enslaved Africans were imported to the United States, 7.8% to Jamaica, and 0.03% to the US Virgin Islands [1,2,3]. Further east in Lower Guinea [5] were the Akan speaking peoples with likely cultural origins in the second century CE (common era) in local iron working and trading societies at Begho [9] within what is Ghana. West Central Africa was home to several societies (such as Loango, Ndongo, Luba, Kuba), and notably the Kingdom of the Kongo, which shared some common metaphysical beliefs between them, the elite in the Kongo eventually accepted Christianity [4]

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