Scientists from the University of Copenhagen (KU) used DNA analysis to discover the origins of enslaved Africans who were freed by the British and later abandoned on a remote island in the Atlantic Ocean. The study was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Great Britain profited greatly from the slave trade. Between 1562 and 1807, the country used 2.7 million enslaved Africans to develop the economy of Britain and its colonies. In 1833, he announced the abolition of slavery and began to fight against the slaveholding courts. As part of Britain’s attempt to eliminate the transatlantic slave trade, an estimated 27,000 slaves from Africa were stolen from captured ships between 1840 and 1867 and settled on the island of Saint Helena.

Africans who survived the difficult conditions of the journey arrived in St. He was quarantined in Rupert Valley on the island of Helena. Eight thousand people did not survive dehydration, dysentery, smallpox and malnutrition. Some of the survivors were sent back to Africa or taken to the West Indies, while others were allowed to remain on the island.

Which parts of Africa they belong to has until now been a matter of speculation. In a new study, DNA extracted from the bones of 20 people was compared with the genomes of more than three thousand modern Africans from 90 populations in sub-Saharan Africa.

The results were largely consistent with historical documents: 17 of the 20 were men; The abducted people belonged to different groups with different languages ​​and traditions. They came from different populations located between northern Angola and Gabon. This is linked to the movement of the slave trade northward from Central Angola in the 19th century.

“I think this research demonstrates how ancient genomics can be used to recover long-lost aspects of the lives and experiences of enslaved and other marginalized populations, whose histories have often been omitted from written sources or deliberately obscured.”– said Hannes Schroeder, Associate Professor of Genomics at the University of Copenhagen. Source