The trans-Saharan slave trade - clues from interpolation analyses and high-resolution characterization of mitochondrial DNA lineages

BMC Evolutionary Biology

Research Article

Nuno M Silva¹  Joana B Pereira²  Verónica Fernandes²  Marta D Costa²  Luísa Pereira³  Mostafa Kandil⁴  Nourdin Harich⁴ 

[1] Instituto de Patologia e Imunologia Molecular da Universidade do Porto (IPATIMUP), Porto, Portugal;Instituto de Patologia e Imunologia Molecular da Universidade do Porto (IPATIMUP), Porto, Portugal;Institute of Integrative and Comparative Biology, Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK;Instituto de Patologia e Imunologia Molecular da Universidade do Porto (IPATIMUP), Porto, Portugal;Medical Faculty, University of Porto, Portugal;Laboratoire d'Anthropogénétique, Départment de Biologie, Faculté des Sciences, Université Chouaïb Doukkali, El Jadida, Morocco;

关键词: Recent Common Ancestor;    Slave Trade;    Haplogroup Frequency;    Interpolation Analysis;    North African Population;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2148-10-138

 received in 2009-09-28, accepted in 2010-05-10,  发布年份 2010

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundA proportion of 1/4 to 1/2 of North African female pool is made of typical sub-Saharan lineages, in higher frequencies as geographic proximity to sub-Saharan Africa increases. The Sahara was a strong geographical barrier against gene flow, at least since 5,000 years ago, when desertification affected a larger region, but the Arab trans-Saharan slave trade could have facilitate enormously this migration of lineages. Till now, the genetic consequences of these forced trans-Saharan movements of people have not been ascertained.ResultsThe distribution of the main L haplogroups in North Africa clearly reflects the known trans-Saharan slave routes: West is dominated by L1b, L2b, L2c, L2d, L3b and L3d; the Center by L3e and some L3f and L3w; the East by L0a, L3h, L3i, L3x and, in common with the Center, L3f and L3w; while, L2a is almost everywhere. Ages for the haplogroups observed in both sides of the Saharan desert testify the recent origin (holocenic) of these haplogroups in sub-Saharan Africa, claiming a recent introduction in North Africa, further strengthened by the no detection of local expansions.ConclusionsThe interpolation analyses and complete sequencing of present mtDNA sub-Saharan lineages observed in North Africa support the genetic impact of recent trans-Saharan migrations, namely the slave trade initiated by the Arab conquest of North Africa in the seventh century. Sub-Saharan people did not leave traces in the North African maternal gene pool for the time of its settlement, some 40,000 years ago.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Harich et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2010. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.