Ancestry in the Americas

The populations of the African Diaspora have a particular interest in the new genomics, and its relationship to ancestry. Unlike other post-Columbian Diasporas they have sketchy, at best, knowledge of the regions from which their ancestors arrived. This probably explains the popularity of Roots and Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s various genealogical projects which have utilized cutting edge genomics. It may seem silly to hang one's hat on one maternal lineage, but perhaps it seems silly if you are relatively assured of the broad outlines of your own genealogy. The fact that I am U2b is not very interesting to me, but I also happen to know that my maternal grandmother's mother's family were long resident in their region of Bengal (and, that her father was a migrant from northwest India). It would be a different matter if my ancestors had been enslaved and dispossessed of their heritage. A new paper in PLoS ONE surveys the paternal (NYR), maternal (mtDNA), and autsomal (using 175 ancestrally informative markers), heritage of a range of African origin populations from across the Americans. Dissecting the Within-Africa Ancestry of Populations of African Descent in the Americas: