| Author |
Message |
    
Tonya
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 4190
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, January 25, 2007 - 04:39 pm: | 
|
Genes reveal West African heritage of white Brits
11:24 24 January 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Roxanne Khamsi
Gene tests on a sample of “indigenous” Englishmen have thrown up a surprise black ancestry, providing new insight into a centuries-old African presence in Britain.
The research, funded by the Wellcome Trust, identified a rare West African Y chromosome in a group of men from Yorkshire who share a surname that dates back at least as far as the mid-14th century and have a typical European appearance. They owe their unusual Y chromosome to an African man living in England at least 250 years ago and perhaps as early as Roman times, the researchers say.
Mark Jobling at the University of Leicester, UK, and colleagues recruited 421 men who described themselves as British and analysed their genes as part of a survey of British Y chromosome diversity. To the researchers’ surprise, they found that one individual in the study carried a very rare Y chromosome, called hgA1.
This particular variant has previously been identified in only 26 people worldwide, three African Americans and 23 men living in West African countries such as Guinea-Bissau and Senegal. “It’s so distinctive, it really sticks out like a sore thumb,” Jobling says of the chromosome’s unique sequence. He adds that it is virtually impossible for this sequence to have coincidentally evolved in Britain.
The white British subject with the hgA1 variant, however, knew of no African family connection.
Father to son
To explore the mysterious origin of his Y chromosome scientists recruited 18 other men that shared his rare surname, which dates back to the first use of surnames, hundreds of years ago, and was first recorded in the county of Yorkshire, in northern England. The researchers have not disclosed the surname to maintain the men’s privacy.
The team hoped that this would help them pinpoint when the hgA1 had variant entered the lineage, since Y chromosomes, like surnames, are passed from father to son.
Of the 18 men with the Yorkshire surname, six of them carried the hgA1 Y chromosome – including one man in the US, whose ancestors had migrated from England in 1894.
Genealogical records linked these men to two family trees, both dating back to the 1780s in Yorkshire. Jobling believes that these two genealogies are connected by a common male ancestor of West African descent living in England at least 250 years ago.
Viking capture
The British men carry an hgA1 Y chromosome that closely matches the one identified in men presently living in West Africa. This suggests that the former group’s black ancestor arrived in Britain within the past few thousand years. Had their hgA1 Y chromosome been introduced any thousands of years earlier, when humans first migrated from Africa to Europe, its sequence would have shown greater divergence from the one currently found in West Africa.
The hgA1 Y chromosome could perhaps have entered the gene pool in northern England 1800 years ago when Africans fought there as Roman soldiers, Jobling says. It also might have been introduced in the 9th century, when Vikings brought captured North Africans to Britain, according to some historians.
But scientists note that the majority of black men with the hgA1 variant currently live in Guinea-Bissau and nearby countries in West Africa. Because many slaves from this area came to Britain beginning in the mid-16th century, it is likely that the white men with the hgA1 variant have a black ancestor that arrived this way, researchers say.
This ancestor could have been a first-generation immigrant African or one whose family had lived in Britain for generations.
Famed writer
Jobling says his study provides the first evidence of a long-lived African presence in Britain. He adds that it raises the possibility that relationships among black and white people was perhaps more historically acceptable in Britain than some people might believe.
Vincent Brown of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, agrees and points to the example of Olaudah Equiano, a slave from West Africa who bought his freedom in Britain in the mid 18th century and achieved fame for his writing. Equiano lived in London and eventually married a white woman, notes Brown, who studies the history of slavery.
The new findings are unusual because they reveal the hidden African ancestry of white men, Jobling says. He notes that it is much more common for studies to discover or confirm the reverse. For example, gene tests gave strong evidence that the black descendents of the slave Sally Hemmings could also trace their ancestry to her "owner", the third US president, Thomas Jefferson (Nature, vol 396, p 27).
And several years ago, Jobling’s team found that more than a quarter of British African-Caribbean men have a Y chromosome which traces back to Europe rather than Africa.
Journal reference: European Journal of Human Genetics (DOI: 10.1038/sj.ejhg.5201771)
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/dn11018-genes-reveal-west-africa n-heritage-of-white-brits.html
Related Articles
Y chromosomes give the name away
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8757
22 February 2006
DNA-based genealogy test reveals infertility
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18624983.200
07 May 2005
Meet the ancestors
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg17723823.400
15 February 2003
Slaves of the past
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg16021617.500
21 November 1998
http://cordis.europa.eu/fetch?CALLER=EN_NEWS&ACTION=D&SESSION=&RCN=27002
http://www.yorkshiretoday.co.uk/ViewArticle2.aspx?SectionID=55&ArticleID=1988975
Weblinks
Mark Jobling, University of Leicester
http://www.le.ac.uk/genetics/maj4/
European Journal of Human Genetics
http://www.nature.com/ejhg/index.html
Wellcome Trust
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/ |
Nels
Veteran Poster
Username: Nels
Post Number: 740
Registered: 07-2005
Rating: 
Votes: 1 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, January 25, 2007 - 10:10 pm: |
|
Old news. It's a rehash of previous findings and assumptions from more than five years ago, and there is no furthern implication. |
Dahomeyahosi
Regular Poster
Username: Dahomeyahosi
Post Number: 173
Registered: 01-2006
Rating: 
Votes: 4 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, January 26, 2007 - 09:09 am: |
|
Perhaps some of them will join Kathleen Cleaver and be black. And no doubt they will probably be accepted....nonsense.
|
Serenasailor
Veteran Poster
Username: Serenasailor
Post Number: 1160
Registered: 01-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, January 30, 2007 - 06:49 pm: |
|
Perhaps some of them will join Kathleen Cleaver and be black. And no doubt they will probably be accepted....nonsense.
LOL!!!!! |
Ntfs_encryption
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Ntfs_encryption
Post Number: 1694
Registered: 10-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, January 31, 2007 - 01:48 am: |
|
"Perhaps some of them will join Kathleen Cleaver and be black. And no doubt they will probably be accepted....nonsense."
Join her for what? She's already black. It's already documented. Why are you having problems with it? And where were you in the sixties when she was fighting racism in the South and organizing black communities against rampant police brutality in California? Yeah, uh huh....that's what I thought. End of subject.....
|
Urban_scribe
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Urban_scribe
Post Number: 351
Registered: 05-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, January 31, 2007 - 09:31 am: |
|
Comparing the European concept of Blackness to the American concept of Blackness is, well, nonsense.
It's a well-documented fact that the British royal family has African ancestry. You don't hear ANYONE calling them Black, do you? Three-hundred-year-old African ancestry is considered negligible, at best. Recent African admixture, say three generations removed or less, is usually taken into consideration. So for all intents and purposes, this study group will continue to be regarded as White despite genetically having distant African admixture - just like the royal family. |
Latina_wi
Regular Poster
Username: Latina_wi
Post Number: 88
Registered: 08-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, February 08, 2007 - 12:21 am: |
|
It is RUMOURED that a branch of the British royal family had black blood....many dispute whether or not this is true.
And I personally would find it RIDICULOUS if these men were called 'black' just because they found out they had some black ancestor from 600 years ago. What if they never found out? They would just still be white lol.
I have a great great grandfather who was Scottish, I ain't going to start proclaiming that this is the be all and end all of my family ancestry and where my family's history began. So why the heck should these men? I bet if they did though people would still accept them, it makes me laugh how someone can go 'I am 1/24th black therefore I am black'. Guarantee you if a black person did it the other way they would be called a 'coconut'. |
|
Email This Page