Washington (AFP)
The slave trade between Africa and the Americas and the economic and sexual exploitation of millions of men and women until the 19th century can be traced in the DNA of their descendants, describes a large study published on Thursday and carried out thanks to the genetic profiles accumulated by the company 23andMe.
More than 50,000 people in the Americas, Europe and Africa participated in this startling study combining individual DNA analyzes and detailed records of the ships that transported the slaves, 12.5 million men, women and men. children between 1515 and 1865, 70% of which were landed in Latin America, and between 300,000 and 500,000 in mainland North America. More than two million died during the trip.
"We wanted to compare our genetic results to transport manifests to find possible disagreements, which appeared in some cases quite blatantly," Steven Micheletti, the company's geneticist, told AFP.
They realized that although the slaves were predominantly men, African women over the centuries have contributed much more genetically to the current population, which they observed by analyzing the genes of the X chromosome, which women have. two fold.
"In some regions, we estimate that 17 African women reproduced for each African man, we would never have thought that this ratio was so high", continues the researcher.
This is explained by the policy of "dilution" or "racial whitening" then practiced in Latin America: the policy was to "whitewash" the population by encouraging reproduction between settlers and slaves, especially in Brazil at the beginning of the 19th century, recall the authors of the study, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
Conversely, African men and women in the United States reproduced in almost the same proportions.
“The tendency was to encourage procreation between slaves in order to produce more slaves,” says Joanna Mountain, research director at 23andMe, although rape of slaves by their owners was also common.
The study also reveals that African-Americans in the United States are predominantly genetically linked to populations who lived in a region of Africa corresponding to present-day Nigeria, whereas at the time, these populations represented only a minority of slaves sent to the United States.
In fact, they had arrived in the Caribbean and were then transported back to the United States, an inter-American phase of the slave trade that is only just beginning to be rediscovered.
The under-representation of the genetic inheritance of Senegambia in the United States has a grim explanation: "As the Senegambians were often rice farmers in Africa, they were often transported to rice plantations in the United States. These plantations were often invaded by malaria and had a high mortality rate, which arguably led to the genetic under-representation of Senegambia in African Americans today, ”writes Steven Micheletti.
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