Charting the Ancestry of African Americans

The Atlantic slave trade promoted by West European empires (15th–19th centuries) forcibly moved at least 11 million people from Africa, including about one-third from west-central Africa, to European and American des-tinations. The mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genome has retained an imprint of this process, but previous analyses lacked west-central African data. Here, we make use of an African database of 4,860 mtDNAs, which include 948 mtDNA sequences from west-central Africa and a further 154 from the southwest, and compare these for the first time with a publicly available database of 1,148 African Americans from the United States that contains 1,053 mtDNAs of sub-Saharan ancestry. We show that 155 % of the U.S. lineages have a West African ancestry, with!41 % coming from west-central or southwestern Africa. These results are remarkably similar to the most up-to-date analyses of the historical record. The number of people of recent African ancestry living in the Americas is comparable to that in Africa itself, largely because of the forced mass migrations of the Atlantic slave trade during the 15th–19th centuries. Historical documentation indicates that many Africans were taken from the West African coast but that a large proportion were also taken from the former Portugues