Y chromosome diversity in a linguistic isolate (Mirandese, NE Portugal)

The Dominican Republic is one of the two countries on the Hispaniola island, which is part of the Antilles. Hispaniola was interested by the European colonisation and massive deportation of African slaves since the XVI century and these events heavily shaped the genetic composition of the present-day population. In order to shed light about the effect of the European rules, we analysed 92 SNPs on the Y chromosome in 182 Dominican individuals from three different locations. The Dominican Y haplogroup composition was characterised by an excess of northern African/European lineages (59%), followed by the African clades (38%), while the Native-American lineages were rare (3%). The comparison with the mtDNA variability, dominated by African clades, revealed a sex-biased admixture pattern, in line with the colonial society dominated by European men. When other Caribbean and non-Caribbean former colonies were also considered, we noted a difference between territories under a Spanish rule (like the Dominican Republic) and British/French rule, with the former characterised by an excess of European Y lineages reflecting the more permissive Iberian legislation about mixed people and slavery. Finally, we analysed the distribution in Africa of the Dominican lineages with a putative African origin, mainly focusing on central and western Africa, which were the main sources of African slaves. We found that most (83%) of the African lineages observed in Santo Domingo have a central African ancestry, suggesting that most of the slaves were deported from regions

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“…2011 ; Zhong et al. 2011 ; Marques et al. 2016 ) ( supplementary table 2 , Supplementary Material online).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Y Haplogroup Diversity of the Dominican Republic: Reconstructing the Effect of the European Colonization and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trades

D’Atanasio

Trionfetti

Bonito

et al. 2020

Genome Biology and Evolution

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Middle eastern genetic legacy in the paternal and maternal gene pools of Chuetas

Ferragut¹,

Ramón

Castro

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

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Chuetas are a group of descendants of Majorcan Crypto-Jews (Balearic Islands, Spain) who were socially stigmatized and segregated by their Majorcan neighbours until recently; generating a community that, although after the seventeenth century no longer contained Judaic religious elements, maintained strong group cohesion, Jewishness consciousness, and endogamy. Collective memory fixed 15 surnames as a most important defining element of Chueta families. Previous studies demonstrated Chuetas were a differentiated population, with a considerable proportion of their original genetic make-up. Genetic data of Y-chromosome polymorphism and mtDNA control region showed, in Chuetas’ paternal lineages, high prevalence of haplogroups J2-M172 (33%) and J1-M267 (18%). In maternal lineages, the Chuetas hallmark is the presence of a new sub-branching of the rare haplogroup R0a2m as their modal haplogroup (21%). Genetic diversity in both Y-chromosome and mtDNA indicates the Chueta community has managed to avoid the expected heterogeneity decrease in their gene pool after centuries of isolation and inbreeding. Moreover, the composition of their uniparentally transmitted lineages demonstrates a remarkable signature of Middle Eastern ancestry—despite some degree of host admixture—confirming Chuetas have retained over the centuries a considerable degree of ancestral genetic signature along with the cultural memory of their Jewish origin.

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Y chromosome diversity in a linguistic isolate (Mirandese, NE Portugal)

Cited by 2 publications

References 41 publications

Y Haplogroup Diversity of the Dominican Republic: Reconstructing the Effect of the European Colonization and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trades

Y Haplogroup Diversity of the Dominican Republic: Reconstructing the Effect of the European Colonization and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trades

Middle eastern genetic legacy in the paternal and maternal gene pools of Chuetas

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