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. 2020 Sep 1;12(9):1579-1590.
doi: 10.1093/gbe/evaa176.

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

Eugenia D'Atanasio  1   2 , Flavia Trionfetti  2 , Maria Bonito  2 , Daniele Sellitto  1 , Alfredo Coppa  3   4   5 , Andrea Berti  6 , Beniamino Trombetta  2 , Fulvio Cruciani  1   2   7
Affiliations

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

Eugenia D'Atanasio et al. Genome Biol Evol. .

Abstract

The Dominican Republic is one of the two countries on the Hispaniola island, which is part of the Antilles. Hispaniola was affected by the European colonization and massive deportation of African slaves since the XVI century and these events heavily shaped the genetic composition of the present-day population. To shed light about the effect of the European rules, we analyzed 92 single nucleotide polymorphisms on the Y chromosome in 182 Dominican individuals from three different locations. The Dominican Y haplogroup composition was characterized by an excess of northern African/European lineages (59%), followed by the African clades (38%), whereas the Native-American lineages were rare (3%). The comparison with the mitochondrial DNA 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 characterized by an excess of European Y lineages reflecting the more permissive Iberian legislation about mixed people and slavery. Finally, we analyzed 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.

Keywords: African ancestry; Antilles; Dominican Republic; Y-SNPs; central Africa; trans-Atlantic slave trade.

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Figures

<sc>Fig</sc>. 1.
Fig. 1.
Geographic localization of the three sampling places in the Dominican Republic.
<sc>Fig</sc>. 2.
Fig. 2.
Y haplogroup distribution of main haplogroups in the Greater Antilles. The larger pies represent the three Dominican populations here analyzed. Data from the literature (smaller pies) for the Dominican Republic and the other islands of the Greater Antilles are also shown (Mendizabal et al. 2008; Bryc et al. 2010; Simms et al. 2012; Vilar et al. 2014; Poznik et al. 2016). The Cuban samples from (Mendizabal et al. 2008) classified as R1-M173* have not been tested for M269 and have been represented with a striped fill. The group “Others” includes all the samples with the ancestral state at the markers here reported and whose ancestry is unknown. aChromosomes from the literature have been assigned to a northern African/European ancestry based on the reported ancestry in the publication and/or the geographic distribution of the derived downstream markers, when available. bThese haplogroups have been assigned to a northern African/European ancestry in our Dominican samples based on successive analyses (see “Major Y Haplogroup Dissection”).
<sc>Fig</sc>. 3.
Fig. 3.
Comparison between the ancestry of the Y and mtDNA lineages in the Greater Antilles. mtDNA data are from (Vilar et al. 2014; Bukhari et al. 2017; Ono et al. 2019; Zaidi and Makova 2019), Y chromosome data are the same as in figure 1, collapsing our results for the three Dominican groups with Dominican data from the literature.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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