New research has identified the first genetic evidence of Africans having lived amongst "indigenous" British people for centuries. Their descendants, living across the UK today, were unaware of their black ancestry.
The University of Leicester study, funded by the Wellcome Trust and published today in the journal European Journal of Human Genetics, found that one third of men with a rare Yorkshire surname carry a rare Y chromosome type previously found only amongst people of West African origin.
The researchers, led by Professor Mark Jobling, of the Department of Genetics at the University of Leicester, first spotted the rare Y chromosome type, known as hgA1, in one individual, Mr. X. This happened whilst PhD student Ms. Turi King was sampling a larger group in a study to explore the association between surnames and the Y chromosome, both inherited from father to son. Mr. X, a white Caucasian living in Leicester, was unaware of having any African ancestors.
"As you can imagine, we were pretty amazed to find this result in someone unaware of having any African roots," explains Professor Jobling, a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow. "The Y chromosome is passed down from father to son, so this suggested that Mr. X must have had African ancestry somewhere down the line. Our study suggests that this must have happened some time ago."
Although most of Britain's one million people who define themselves as "Black or Black British" owe their origins to immigration from the Caribbean and Africa from the mid-twentieth century onwards, in reality, there has been a long history of contact with Africa. Africans were first recorded in the north 1800 years ago, as Roman soldiers defending Hadrian's Wall.
To investigate the origins of hgA1 in Britain, the team recruited and studied a further eighteen males with the same surname as Mr. X. All but one were from the UK, with paternal parents and grandparents also born in Britain. Six, including one male in the US whose ancestors had migrated from England in 1894, were found to have the hgA1 chromosome.
Further genealogical research to identify a common ancestor for all seven X-surnamed males suggests that the hgA1 Y chromosome must have entered their lineage over 250 years ago. However, it is unclear whether the male ancestor was a first generation African immigrant or a European man carrying an African Y chromosome introduced into Britain some time earlier, or even whether the hgA1 Y chromosome goes back as far as the Roman occupation.
"This study shows that what it means to be British is complicated and always has been," says Professor Jobling. "Human migration history is clearly very complex, particularly for an island nation such as ours, and this study further debunks the idea that there are simple and distinct populations or 'races'."
In addition, Professor Jobling believes that the research may have implications for DNA profiling in criminal investigations.
"Forensic scientists use DNA analysis to predict a person's ethnic origins, for example from hair or blood samples found at a crime scene. Whilst they are very likely to predict the correct ethnicity by using wider analysis of DNA other than the Y chromosome, finding this remarkable African chromosome would certainly have them scratching their heads for a while."
Sub-Saharan African Y chromosome haplogroup A in white British surname
posted by Dienekes on Wednesday, January 24, 2007
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From the BBC story:
People of African origin have lived in Britain for centuries, according to genetic evidence.
A Leicester University study found that seven men with a rare Yorkshire surname carry a genetic signature previously found only in people of African origin.
The men seem to have shared a common ancestor in the 18th Century, but the African DNA lineage they carry may have reached Britain centuries earlier.
...
By chance, the researchers discovered a white man with a rare Yorkshire surname carrying a Y chromosome haplogroup that had previously been found only in West African men. And even there, it is relatively uncommon.
"We found that he was in haplogroup A1, which is highly West African-specific," said Turi King, a co-author on the study at the University of Leicester.
"It is incredibly rare, there are only 25 other people known worldwide and they are all African."
...
Prior to the 20th Century, there have been various routes by which people of African ancestry might have reached Britain. For example, the Romans recruited from Africa and elsewhere for the garrison that guarded Hadrian's Wall.
...
Another major route was through the slave trade.
"Some of the Africans who arrived in Britain through the slave trade rose quite high up in society, and we know they married with the rest of the population," said Ms King.
"It could be either of these two routes," she said. Even if the two family trees link up in the 18th Century, haplogroup A1 could have reached Britain long before that.
"But my guess is that, because many slaves came from West Africa, it could have been through that route," Ms King told BBC News.
From the EurekAlert release:
New research has identified the first genetic evidence of Africans having lived amongst "indigenous" British people for centuries. Their descendants, living across the UK today, were unaware of their black ancestry.
...
"As you can imagine, we were pretty amazed to find this result in someone unaware of having any African roots," explains Professor Jobling, a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow. "The Y chromosome is passed down from father to son, so this suggested that Mr. X must have had African ancestry somewhere down the line. Our study suggests that this must have happened some time ago."
Although most of Britain's one million people who define themselves as "Black or Black British" owe their origins to immigration from the Caribbean and Africa from the mid-twentieth century onwards, in reality, there has been a long history of contact with Africa. Africans were first recorded in the north 1800 years ago, as Roman soldiers defending Hadrian's Wall.
To investigate the origins of hgA1 in Britain, the team recruited and studied a further eighteen males with the same surname as Mr. X. All but one were from the UK, with paternal parents and grandparents also born in Britain. Six, including one male in the US whose ancestors had migrated from England in 1894, were found to have the hgA1 chromosome.
...
"This study shows that what it means to be British is complicated and always has been," says Professor Jobling. "Human migration history is clearly very complex, particularly for an island nation such as ours, and this study further debunks the idea that there are simple and distinct populations or 'races'." [DP: This is a common fallacious argument against the existence of biological races; demand that races be completely genetically distinct, and then "debunk" their existence at any slightest sign of intermixture. It is indeed the distinctness of the European and Sub-Saharan African Y chromosome pools that allows us to infer the origin of rare outliers. Human races are not isolated islands, but rather more or less sharply defined hills or mountains on the genetic landscape].
In addition, Professor Jobling believes that the research may have implications for DNA profiling in criminal investigations.
"Forensic scientists use DNA analysis to predict a person's ethnic origins, for example from hair or blood samples found at a crime scene. Whilst they are very likely to predict the correct ethnicity by using wider analysis of DNA other than the Y chromosome, finding this remarkable African chromosome would certainly have them scratching their heads for a while."
I don't see the EJHG article on the website yet, feel free to leave a comment if I missed it or it is published online.
[UPDATE] From the paper:
Our study shows that a globally rare Y-chromosome type, belonging to the deepest-rooting African branch of the Y-phylogeny, has been present in Northern England since at least the mid-18th century. HgE3a is by far the most frequent Y-chromosomal lineage in Africa, existing at 48% in a continent-wide sample of 1122 chromosomes,30 so we would expect any substantial past immigration from Africa to Britain to have left examples of chromosomes belonging to this common hg. However, a survey of 1772 Y chromosomes from the British Isles found none,13 and they are also absent from our control sample of 421 chromosomes. The general rarity of African lineages may reflect a low level of initial introgression, later loss through drift, or sampling bias – for example, the large British survey13 sampled from small towns, in which the descendants of early British Africans, who were concentrated in cities, may be depleted.
Admixture between populations of African and European origin is often sex-biased, with a greater proportion of the African component of the hybrid population being contributed by females.48 Assuming an equal number of males and females of African origin migrating to Britain, we might therefore expect mitochondrial DNA to reveal a stronger signal of African admixture than the Y chromosome. There is little published evidence, but a study of mitochondrial DNA sequence diversity among 100 'white Caucasian' British49 does contain one haplotype, which represents an hg L1c sequence (defined according to Salas et al.50), with a probable origin in West Central Africa.51 This could represent a possible maternal counterpart to the Y-lineage we describe here.
Here is the abstract:
European Journal of Human Genetics (advance online publication)
Africans in Yorkshire? The deepest-rooting clade of the Y phylogeny within an English genealogy
Turi E King et al.
Abstract
The presence of Africans in Britain has been recorded since Roman times, but has left no apparent genetic trace among modern inhabitants. Y chromosomes belonging to the deepest-rooting clade of the Y phylogeny, haplogroup (hg) A, are regarded as African-specific, and no examples have been reported from Britain or elsewhere in Western Europe. We describe the presence of an hgA1 chromosome in an indigenous British male; comparison with African examples suggests a Western African origin. Seven out of 18 men carrying the same rare east-Yorkshire surname as the original male also carry hgA1 chromosomes, and documentary research resolves them into two genealogies with most-recent-common-ancestors living in Yorkshire in the late 18th century. Analysis using 77 Y-short tandem repeats (STRs) is consistent with coalescence a few generations earlier. Our findings represent the first genetic evidence of Africans among 'indigenous' British, and emphasize the complexity of human migration history as well as the pitfalls of assigning geographical origin from Y-chromosomal haplotypes.
Joined: 30 Mar 2005 {Posts: 1057 } Location: New Jersey
Posted: Fri 26 Jan 2007 15:18 Post subject:
Frank, did you notice Dienekes's cute little aside embedded in the above?
Dienekes Pontikos wrote:
DP: This is a common fallacious argument against the existence of biological races; demand that races be completely genetically distinct, and then "debunk" their existence at any slightest sign of intermixture. It is indeed the distinctness of the European and Sub-Saharan African Y chromosome pools that allows us to infer the origin of rare outliers. Human races are not isolated islands, but rather more or less sharply defined hills or mountains on the genetic landscape.
This guy runs a website hailed as a "great research genetic tool" by White supremacists from southern Europe. I've been battling him as least as long as I have been battling Racial Reality. In fact, the two are close friends (surprise, surprise). They are both well known for falsifying or fraudulently "debunking" genetic studies that show sub-Saharan and Asiatic admixture in Greeks and Italians. But we've been over all that before...
Incidentally, I don't know what the authors of the article mean by "Western Europe," but haplogroup A has been found in Sardinians, according to Capelli, et al., 2006. It has also been found in Greece, incidentally, which of course is not western Europe (Di Giacomo, et al., 2003).
The article, though, is quite interesting, and does corroborate the the mtDNA findings of Richards, 1998 (apparently from Piercy, 1993). Of course, there is the article that references the Brian Sykes study of 10,000 Britons and says one percent of White Britons have Asian or African ancestors. I can't seem to find any abstract or the full study on this, though, but I do of course trust Sykes and his results:
Quote:
One in one hundred white Britons directly descended from an African or Asian
May 20 2001
DNA reveals black genes in white Britons
Jonathan Leake, Science Editor
ONE in every 100 "white" Britons is directly descended from an African or Asian, a new study has found. The study, which looked at the DNA of 10,000 people, found that many who believed their ancestry to be completely British were actually far more diverse.
Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University, believes the DNA originates in Africans brought to Britain as soldiers and slaves by the Romans.
Among those whom Sykes found with a strong selection of African genes were a dairy farmer from Somerset whose British ancestry can be traced back hundreds of years.
Many other discoveries cannot be so easily explained. Sykes found that a primary school teacher in Edinburgh had Polynesian DNA that could only have originated from tribes in the south Pacific, even though her family could trace its British ancestry for at least 200 years.
Sykes believes such discoveries show that long migrations and consequent mixing of populations have always been a feature of humanity, making talk about racial purity meaningless.
He said: "This makes nonsense of any biological basis for racial classification. We are all a complex mixture and, at the same time, we are all related."
Similar analyses on black Britons have helped them to establish the links to their past that were destroyed when their ancestors were captured by slave traders.
Jendayi Serwah, of Bristol, came to Britain from Jamaica and was unable to trace her ancestry more than a few generations. Gene tests showed that she was almost certainly descended from members of the Kenyan Kikuyu tribe.
Other recent research has further undermined claims that Britain, or groups within it, could be racially unmixed. It showed that almost everybody of native European descent could trace their ancestry back to one of seven women who lived between 45,000 and 10,000 years ago.
Sykes is part of a project to create a genetic map of the British Isles, including Ireland. Early results suggest that, despite each group's claims to distinct origins, Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland were once members of the same tribe, some of whose members emigrated to southwest Scotland in about 800AD.
Sykes believes such discoveries show that long migrations and consequent mixing of populations have always been a feature of humanity, making talk about racial purity meaningless.
Heaven for me looks like getting to the pont where the majority of humans realize and believe this statement.
I tried posting at Dodona when it first opened as the voice of reason, but was ignored. But that was because Dienekes and his cronies (including Racial Reality) knew me from the the latter's old board, called Racial Myths. Do you recall that board?
Joined: 30 Mar 2005 {Posts: 1057 } Location: New Jersey
Posted: Fri 26 Jan 2007 16:24 Post subject:
sagascend wrote:
Quote:
Sykes believes such discoveries show that long migrations and consequent mixing of populations have always been a feature of humanity, making talk about racial purity meaningless.
Heaven for me looks like getting to the pont where the majority of humans realize and believe this statement.
Yes, indeed! Incidentally, Dienekes Pontikos's aside comment that he added to the article above is a contradiction and shows he knows not of what he speaks:
Dienekes wrote:
[. . . ]Human races are not isolated islands, but rather more or less sharply defined hills or mountains on the genetic landscape.
If "races" are not genetic islands, then how can they be true "races" rather than just variations within the human race? See what I had to deal with all those years on the Racial Myths forum with characters like this? It's damned near impossible to get through to these turkeys.
European Journal of Human Genetics advance online publication 24 January 2007; doi: 10.1038/sj.ejhg.5201771
Africans in Yorkshire? The deepest-rooting clade of the Y phylogeny within an English genealogy
Turi E King1, Emma J Parkin1, Geoff Swinfield2, Fulvio Cruciani3, Rosaria Scozzari3, Alexandra Rosa4, Si-Keun Lim5, Yali Xue5, Chris Tyler-Smith5 and Mark A Jobling1
1Department of Genetics, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
2GSGS, 14 Beaconsfield Road, Mottingham, London, UK
3Department of Genetics and Molecular Biology, Università degli Studi di Roma 'La Sapienza', Rome, Italy
4Human Genetics Laboratory, University of Madeira, Funchal, Portugal
5Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, UK
Correspondence: Professor MA Jobling, Department of Genetics, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK. Tel: +44 116 252 3427; Fax: +44 116 252 3378; E-mail: maj4@leicester.ac.uk
Received 19 September 2006; Revised 23 November 2006; Accepted 28 November 2006; Published online 24 January 2007.
Top of pageAbstract
The presence of Africans in Britain has been recorded since Roman times, but has left no apparent genetic trace among modern inhabitants. Y chromosomes belonging to the deepest-rooting clade of the Y phylogeny, haplogroup (hg) A, are regarded as African-specific, and no examples have been reported from Britain or elsewhere in Western Europe. We describe the presence of an hgA1 chromosome in an indigenous British male; comparison with African examples suggests a Western African origin. Seven out of 18 men carrying the same rare east-Yorkshire surname as the original male also carry hgA1 chromosomes, and documentary research resolves them into two genealogies with most-recent-common-ancestors living in Yorkshire in the late 18th century. Analysis using 77 Y-short tandem repeats (STRs) is consistent with coalescence a few generations earlier. Our findings represent the first genetic evidence of Africans among 'indigenous' British, and emphasize the complexity of human migration history as well as the pitfalls of assigning geographical origin from Y-chromosomal haplotypes.
Keywords: Y chromosome, haplogroup, African, surnames, genealogy, Y-STRs
Top of pageIntroduction
The population of the UK today is culturally diverse, with 8% of its 54 million inhabitants belonging to ethnic minorities, and over one million classifying themselves as 'Black or Black British' in the 2001 census. These people owe their origins to immigration from the Caribbean and Africa beginning in the mid-20th century; before this time, the population has been seen as typically Western European, and its history has been interpreted in terms of more local immigration, including that of the Saxons, Vikings and Normans.1 However, in reality, Britain has a long history of contact with Africa (reviewed by Fryer2). Africans were first recorded in the north 1800 years ago, as Roman soldiers defending Hadrian's wall – 'a division of Moors'. Some historians suggest that Vikings brought captured North Africans to Britain in the 9th century. After a hiatus of several hundred years, the influence of the Atlantic slave trade began to be felt, with the first group of West Africans being brought to Britain in 1555. African domestic servants, musicians, entertainers and slaves then became common in the Tudor period, prompting an unsuccessful attempt by Elizabeth I to expel them in 1601. By the last third of the 18th century, there were an estimated 10 000 black people in Britain,3 mostly concentrated in cities such as London.
Has this presence left a genetic trace among people regarded as 'indigenous' British? In principle, Y-chromosomal haplotyping offers a means to detect long-established African lineages. Haplotypes of the non-recombining region of the Y, defined by slowly mutating binary markers such as SNPs, can be arranged into a unique phylogeny.4, 5, 6 These binary haplotypes, known as haplogroups (hg), show a high degree of geographical differentiation, reflecting the powerful influence of genetic drift on this chromosome. Some clades of the phylogeny are so specific to particular continents or regions that they have been used to assign population-of-origin to individual DNA samples,7 and in quantifying the origins of the components of admixed populations using simple allele-counting methods.8, 9, 10
Studies of British genetic diversity, generally sampling on the criterion of two generations of residence, have found no evidence of African Y-chromosomal lineages,11, 12, 13, 14 suggesting that they either never became assimilated into the general population or have been lost by drift. However, here, we describe a globally rare and archetypically African sublineage in Britain and show that it has been resident there for at least 250 years, representing the first genetic trace of an appreciable African presence that has existed for several centuries.2
Top of pageMaterials and methods
DNA samples
British and US males were recruited under appropriate informed consent, and DNA extracted from buccal samples as described.15 R-surnamed British males were sampled randomly using information from electoral rolls, and a specific questionnaire was used to exclude close patrilineal relatives.
Binary marker typing
A set of 11 binary markers (M9, M69, M89, M145, M170, M172, M173, M201, P25, SRY10831 and 12f2) was typed using the SNaPshot minisequencing procedure (Applied Biosystems) as described,15 and the additional hgA-specific markers M91 and M33 typed by DNA sequencing using published primers.5
Y-STR. typing
A set of 17 Y-chromosomal short tandem repeats (Y-STRs: DYS19, DYS388, DYS389I, DYS389II, DYS390, DYS391, DYS392, DYS393, DYS434, DYS435, DYS436, DYS437, DYS438, DYS439, DYS460, DYS461, DYS462) were typed as described.16 HgA1 chromosomes were typed with an additional 51 Y-STRs (DYF386S1, DYF390S1, DYS406S1, DYS472, DYS476, DYS480, DYS481, DYS485, DYS487, DYS488, DYS490, DYS491, DYS492, DYS494, DYS495, DYS497, DYS505, DYS508, DYS511, DYS525, DYS530, DYS531, DYS533, DYS537, DYS540, DYS549, DYS554, DYS556, DYS565, DYS567, DYS568, DYS569, DYS570, DYS572, DYS573, DYS575, DYS576, DYS578, DYS579, DYS580, DYS583, DYS589, DYS590, DYS594, DYS617, DYS618, DYS636, DYS638, DYS640, DYS641 and DYS643) according to Lim et al.17 and with an additional nine (DYS385a/b, DYS425, DYS426, DYS447, DYS448, Y-GATA-H4.1 and YCAIIa/b) according to Parkin et al.18
Network analysis and dating
Median joining networks19 were constructed within the program Network 4.1.0.9 (www.fluxus-engineering.com/sharenet.htm) using variance-based weighting as described.20 Weighting for hgA1 was based on variance in all hgA1 chromosomes, whereas weighting for the R surname network was based on variance observed in 291 British hgR1b chromosomes.
Time-to-most-recent-common-ancestor (TMRCA) was estimated within Network from the -statistic, using a 35-year generation time,15 and a mean per-locus, per-generation mutation rate of 2 10-3.21, 22, 23
Top of pageResults
As part of a survey of British Y-chromosome diversity, we recruited a set of 421 males, who described themselves as British, and whose paternal grandfathers were born in Britain. The Y chromosomes of these males were typed using a set of 11 binary markers,15 including M145 (defining superhaplogroup DE) and M89 (defining superhaplogroup F). All chromosomes carried the derived allele at one or other of these two markers, with a single exception, in male GB1757, which could in principle belong to hgA, B or C (see phylogeny in Figure 1). Further testing, including the markers M91 and M31, gave the surprising result that it belonged to hgA, within the sublineage A1.
Figure 1.Distribution of Y chromosomes belonging to hgA. Distribution of hgA among 4516 Y chromosomes in and around Africa, taken from the literature (see text). The colored sector of each pie chart is proportional to the frequency of subgroups of hgA, defined according to the phylogeny lower left. The gray sector in Cyprus indicates hgA chromosomes that were not further subclassified.32 The phylogeny includes selected markers referred to in the text.
Full figure and legend (107K)
HgA is the deepest-rooting clade of the Y phylogeny, and shows a particularly specific localization to the African continent (Figure 1), which is compatible with an African origin for modern human Y chromosomes. It constitutes 5.4% of a composite sample of 3551 Africans,4, 8, 10, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 whereas in non-African indigenous populations only seven cases have been described, from Turkey,31 Cyprus,32 Sardinia33, 34 and Oman.35 Extensive surveys of Western European populations have failed to find any examples of these chromosomes.13, 36, 37, 38, 39 The subhaplogroup A1 was first reported in a single individual among a sample of 44 males from Mali.4 Subsequently, this scarce Western African hg has been found in only 25 more males (Figure 1): 2/64 Moroccan Berbers,24 3/766 African Americans,40, 41 2/39 Mandinka from Gambia/Senegal, 1/55 Malian Dogon,30 1/201 Cape Verde Islanders, 14/276 males from Guinea-Bissau,10 and 2/39 males from Niger (F Cruciani and R Scozzari, unpublished data).
The British male carrying the hgA1 chromosome knew of no familial African connection, and he displays a typical European appearance. To investigate the relationship of his Y chromosome with African examples, we compared its 10-locus Y-STR haplotype (see Supplementary Information) with those of 10 other available hgA1 chromosomes,10, 24, 40 (F Cruciani and R Scozzari, unpublished data). Figure 2a shows a median-joining network of these haplotypes: they are diverse, and all are unique. Although the British haplotype is peripheral, it lies equidistant (four mutational steps) from Niger and Guinea-Bissau haplotypes, and similar distances (2–4 steps) exist between other haplotypes in the network. This is compatible with a Western African origin for the British chromosome, but does not point to a particular population. Using the British haplotype (11 loci) to search the Y Chromosome Haplotype Reference Database (http://www.yhrd.org) finds no matches among 15 815 chromosomes worldwide, emphasizing its rarity. Also, when the haplotypes of the other hgA1 chromosomes are used in similar searches, they find only self-matches in the populations from which they derive, underlining the scarcity and African-specificity of hgA1.
Figure 2.Diversity of Y-STR haplotypes of chromosomes belonging to hgA1 and within the R surname. (a) Relationships of Y-STR haplotypes within hgA1. Weighted median joining network containing the 10-locus Y-STR haplotypes (DYS19, DYS390, DYS391, DYS392, DYS393, DYS437, DYS438, DYS439, DYS389I, DYS389II-I) of eleven hgA1 chromosomes. Circles represent haplotypes, with area proportional to frequency and colored according to population. (b) Relationships of Y-STR haplotypes carried by men with the R surname. Weighted median joining network containing the 17-locus Y-STR haplotypes of 18 men named R. Circles represent haplotypes, with area proportional to frequency and colored according to hg, as shown in the phylogeny to the left. The node used as a root for dating hgA1 chromosomes is indicated with an asterisk.
Full figure and legend (74K)
How long has this archetypically African Y chromosome been in England? To address this question, our strategy was to seek patrilinearly related individuals who would share the hg, but whose Y-STR haplotype diversity could be used to estimate a TMRCA. To do this, we exploited the relationship between surnames and Y chromosome haplotypes,15, 42, 43, 44 noting that the upper bound of any estimated age would be limited by the fact that hereditary English surnames did not exist before the 11th century.45
The hgA1-bearing male bears a locative surname, which we refer to here as R, deriving from an East Yorkshire village.46 Only 121 people carried this name in 1998 (http://www.spatial-literacy.org/uclnames), and it still has a strong east Yorkshire focus. We recruited 18 apparently unrelated men carrying this name (or a close variant spelling, carried by 50 individuals) and typed a set of 11 binary markers and 17 Y-STRs,15 supplemented with the binary marker M31, allowing us to identify hgA1.
Figure 2b shows a median-joining network of 17-locus Y-STR haplotypes (see Supplementary Information) of Y chromosomes carried by 18 R-surnamed males. The chromosomes belong to three hgs, and include four clusters, indicating either multiple foundation or historical non-paternity within the name. However, a total of seven of the males carry hgA1 chromosomes, belonging to three closely related Y-STR haplotypes, and based on the -statistic within Network, having a TMRCA of 440330 years.
As an empirical adjunct to TMRCA calculations, we undertook extensive genealogical research to ask if the seven R-surnamed males carrying hgA1 chromosomes could be connected into a single genealogy with a historically verifiable MRCA. This research resolved the males into two well-supported genealogies (Figure 3a), with MRCAs born in 1788 and 1789, respectively. However, although both of these ancestors were resident in Yorkshire, evidence could not be found for a familial relationship between them. Patterns of forename usage in the two genealogies are quite distinct, which argues against a very recent connection. We recruited 12 unrelated R-surnamed men from the USA, hoping that the presence of hgA1 would indicate that the chromosome had been associated with the surname before emigration from Britain. However, none of these men carried a chromosome from this hg (data not shown), so the approach was uninformative.
Figure 3.Genealogical relationships and Y-STR haplotypes of hgA1 R-surnamed men. (a) Genealogies of R-surnamed men bearing hgA1 Y chromosomes (left). To the right are their 17-locus Y-STR haplotypes, with differences highlighted by boxes. (b) Additional difference revealed at DYS537; haplotypes based on the other 59 Y-STRs (see text and Supplementary Information) are identical in all males.
Full figure and legend (28K)
Finally, we exploited a new resource of multiple novel Y-STRs47 in an attempt to refine TMRCA for the two genealogies. We typed the hgA1 chromosomes with an additional 60 Y-STRs (see Materials and methods), bringing the total to 77. Surprisingly, this analysis revealed only one new mutation – a single repeat decrease at Y-STR DYS537 in male GB1758 (Figure 3b). Applying the -statistic within Network, as described above, to the 73-locus Y-STR haplotypes (excluding the bilocal DYS385a/b and YCAIIa/b; see Supplementary Information) in the two genealogical clusters yields a TMRCA of 14080 years, which, adding the average age of the living individuals (52 years), equates to a likely oldest date of 1734 for the coalescence of the two genealogies. The TMRCA range overlaps that obtained using 17 markers (see above), and suggests that only a small number of generations separates the two genealogies from their common ancestor.
Top of pageDiscussion
Our study shows that a globally rare Y-chromosome type, belonging to the deepest-rooting African branch of the Y-phylogeny, has been present in Northern England since at least the mid-18th century. HgE3a is by far the most frequent Y-chromosomal lineage in Africa, existing at 48% in a continent-wide sample of 1122 chromosomes,30 so we would expect any substantial past immigration from Africa to Britain to have left examples of chromosomes belonging to this common hg. However, a survey of 1772 Y chromosomes from the British Isles found none,13 and they are also absent from our control sample of 421 chromosomes. The general rarity of African lineages may reflect a low level of initial introgression, later loss through drift, or sampling bias – for example, the large British survey13 sampled from small towns, in which the descendants of early British Africans, who were concentrated in cities, may be depleted.
Admixture between populations of African and European origin is often sex-biased, with a greater proportion of the African component of the hybrid population being contributed by females.48 Assuming an equal number of males and females of African origin migrating to Britain, we might therefore expect mitochondrial DNA to reveal a stronger signal of African admixture than the Y chromosome. There is little published evidence, but a study of mitochondrial DNA sequence diversity among 100 'white Caucasian' British49 does contain one haplotype, which represents an hg L1c sequence (defined according to Salas et al.50), with a probable origin in West Central Africa.51 This could represent a possible maternal counterpart to the Y-lineage we describe here.
The presence of a very rare type of Y chromosome in two distinct branches of a genealogy that coalesce before the late 18th century demonstrates clearly that the chromosome must have been introduced before this time. However, the upper limit on the time of linkage with the R surname is less certain. In principle, the association could have been formed many generations earlier, with the descendants of any earlier-branching lineages having drifted to extinction, or not sampled in our study. As the pattern of Y-diversity in the surname suggests either multiple origins for the name, or non-paternities introducing diverse Y chromosomes, the hgA1 lineage need not have been a founding type at the time of surname establishment (about 700 years ago45). The contributor of the chromosome to the surname may himself have been a first-generation immigrant African, or an admixed and phenotypically European man carrying an African Y chromosome introduced into Britain some time earlier.
The remarkable Y chromosome present in the R surname provides the first genetic evidence of a long-lived African presence within Britain. It represents a cautionary tale for those who would predict population-of-origin from a Y hg,7 and emphasizes the complex nature of the history of human migration.
Top of pageReferences
Davies N: The Isles – a history. Basingstoke: Papermac, 1999.
Fryer P: Staying power: the history of black people in Britain. London: Pluto Press, 1984.
Ramdin R: Reimaging Britain: 500 years of Black and Asian History. London: Pluto Press, 1999.
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Y Chromosome Consortium: A nomenclature system for the tree of human Y-chromosomal binary haplogroups. Genome Res 2002; 12: 339–348.
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Top of pageAcknowledgements
We thank all DNA donors, John Butler for access to samples, and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. TEK was supported by a Wellcome Prize Studentship (061129), MAJ by a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellowship in Basic Biomedical Science (057559), and YX and CTS by the Wellcome Trust. EJP was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Board and the EC Sixth Framework Program under Contract No. ERAS-CT-2003-980409, as part of the European Science Foundation EUROCORES Program OMLL.
Supplementary Information accompanies the paper on European Journal of Human Genetics website (http://www.nature.com/ejhg)
I tried posting at Dodona when it first opened as the voice of reason, but was ignored. But that was because Dienekes and his cronies (including Racial Reality) knew me from the the latter's old board, called Racial Myths. Do you recall that board?
I never knew about 'Racial Myths', but have visited 'Racial Reality' a few times. The old Dodona board was better. You could probably get on now if you change isp.
I thought Professor Sykes had already shown this a while ago.
Quote:
One in every 100 "white" Britons is directly descended from an African or Asian, a study into DNA has found.
The study's author, Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University, believes the DNA originates in Africans brought to Britain as soldiers and slaves by the Romans, the Sunday Times said.
The study found that many who believed their ancestry to be completely British were actually far more diverse.
"This makes nonsense of any biological basis for racial classification," the newspaper quoted Sykes as saying. "We are all a complex mixture and, at the same time, we are all related."
Among those whom Sykes found with a strong selection of African genes was a farmer from Somerset whose British ancestry could be traced back hundreds of years.
I thought Professor Sykes had already shown this a while ago.
Yes, but Sykes studies mtDNA (matrilineal descent). So his previously reported admixture must have come from African females (or their matrilineal descendants) that came to Britain. This new study is on Y haplotypes (patrilineal). So it is the first to show that male Africans, as well as females, also contributed.
I thought Professor Sykes had already shown this a while ago.
Yes, but Sykes studies mtDNA (matrilineal descent). So his previously reported admixture must have come from African females (or their matrilineal descendants) that came to Britain. This new study is on Y haplotypes (patrilineal). So it is the first to show that male Africans, as well as females, also contributed.
So the article's claim is wrong. It isn't the first study to show African presence, but African male presence.
So the article's claim is wrong. It isn't the first study to show African presence, but African male presence.
The article is wrong in the abstract, where is says, "The presence of Africans in Britain has been recorded since Roman times, but has left no apparent genetic trace among modern inhabitants." The article is right in the paragraph starting, "Admixture between populations of African and European origin is often sex-biased,..." which mentions the 1 percent L1 (subsaharan) mtDNA previously found. They may have gotten a bit overenthusiastic in writing the abstract.
Joined: 30 Mar 2005 {Posts: 1057 } Location: New Jersey
Posted: Thu 01 Feb 2007 15:33 Post subject:
Jaime wrote:
I thought Professor Sykes had already shown this a while ago.
I posted the full article further up in this thread.
Frank wrote:
The article is wrong in the abstract, where is says, "The presence of Africans in Britain has been recorded since Roman times, but has left no apparent genetic trace among modern inhabitants." The article is right in the paragraph starting, "Admixture between populations of African and European origin is often sex-biased,..." which mentions the 1 percent L1 (subsaharan) mtDNA previously found. They may have gotten a bit overenthusiastic in writing the abstract.
Yes, I noticed this, too, and was a bit puzzled.
Frank wrote:
Yes, but Sykes studies mtDNA (matrilineal descent). So his previously reported admixture must have come from African females (or their matrilineal descendants) that came to Britain. This new study is on Y haplotypes (patrilineal). So it is the first to show that male Africans, as well as females, also contributed.
I'm not so sure Sykes studied the mtDNA:
Quote:
Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University, believes the DNA originates in Africans brought to Britain as soldiers and slaves by the Romans.
Wouldn't the above suggest that the Y-chromosome was studied, since African soldiers would have been male, and wouldn't pass on their mtDNA?
Unfortunately, although I certainly do trust the press reports about Sykes's findings, they are vague and don't mention what markers were studied. I cannot find any abstract or article on the 10,000 Brits studied by him.
Wouldn't the above suggest that the Y-chromosome was studied, since African soldiers would have been male, and wouldn't pass on their mtDNA?
Thinking the same thing
Quote:
Unfortunately, although I certainly do trust the press reports about Sykes's findings, they are vague and don't mention what markers were studied. I cannot find any abstract or article on the 10,000 Brits studied by him.
I emailed him, but he never responded. I was curious about his findings as well.
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