SOCIETY × GENETICS

An Atrocity Written in DNA

16th to 19th centuries

History · Early Modern · Holocene · Meghalayan

Shipping ledgers record 12.5 million Africans forcibly deported across the Atlantic between the 16th and 19th centuries. The genomes of fifty thousand descendants, read against those ledgers, largely mirror the documented routes, and where they diverge they testify to what documents omit: differing survival, forced movements within the Americas, and the disproportionate, coerced contribution of African women to succeeding generations.

Why it matters

Genetics here serves as an archive for people whom the written record reduced to cargo counts. Tens of millions of living people can see the trade's geography in their own ancestry, connecting them to regions the ledgers only name as ports. The method's published corrections matter too: measuring atrocity demands the same rigour as any science, and gets it.

Dating & uncertainty

The transatlantic trade ran from the early 1500s to the 1860s, deporting an estimated 12.5 million people; the fiche is anchored mid-course. Genetic inferences about regional origins and sex bias carry real uncertainties, and published corrections to the largest study are part of this fiche's sources.

Sources

1. Micheletti et al. (2020), American Journal of Human Genetics · Genetic consequences of the transatlantic slave trade in the Americasdoi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2020.06.012
2. Fortes-Lima & Verdu (2021), Human Molecular Genetics · Anthropological genetics perspectives on the transatlantic slave tradedoi:10.1093/hmg/ddaa271
3. Pfennig & Lachance (2023), American Journal of Human Genetics · Challenges of accurately estimating sex-biased admixture from X chromosomal and autosomal ancestry proportionsdoi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2022.12.012

Our species’ history as one day

23:58:031 min 57 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day