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About a week ago I put up a post put on an analysis of a paper which reported on the ancestral make up of 50 Cubans (as well as assorted other Hispanic/Latino groups). One aspect of the paper which was somewhat notable is that 1 out of 3 Cubans were 90 percent or more European in ancestry. The notability of this is that is that 5 out of 6 Cuban Americans identify as white. That is, of European ancestry. The main caveat here is that these Cubans were sampled from New York City, and to a lesser extent the Midwest. The fact of non-European admixture in putatively white European individuals from Latin America is not surprising. Our prior expectation should be that the admixture is non-trivial, though not preponderant. For example, the majority of the white population of Argentina has Amerindian ancestry (or, more precisely ~15 percent of the aggregate ancestry of Argentineans is Amerindian). At least notionally Cuba is a much more racially mixed culture than Argentina, so non-white admixture in even white Cubans is not surprising.
Based on the above paper (and the data which you can find on other Latin American whites), as well as the genotyping of two Cuban American acquaintances, I asserted that on the order of ~10 percent of the ancestry of the average white Cuban was going to be African. Naturally this prompted some objections. Some of the individuals were not too polite. I think the primary issue that I have to be honest about this is this: I don’t really care too much about the topic on a visceral level. Now, I’m interested in it. And the specific cases illuminate a greater whole, which comments upon various demographic and population genetic dynamics. But I don’t have a strong investment in the specific instance of the particular ancestral quanta of Cubans, or any other group really.
Second, there was some objection to punctilious attention to scientific methodology, such as representativeness and sample size. This is a serious objection in the abstract, but the reality is that a generation of genomics has been performed with lineages as unrepresentative as “Utah whites.” Science and knowledge seeking is frankly operationally an ad hoc and sloppy process, without great attention to the book of proper scientific methodology. When we don’t have much information, any extra information is often useful, so long as we keep in mind the error that this introduces into the process.
All that being said, one commenter brought to my attention an interesting paper. It reports 6 percent African ancestry in a very large population of white Havana Cubans. The main downside is that they used only 60 SNPs, as opposed to the 60,000 SNPs in the above study. Of course those 60 SNPs would be “ancestrally informative,” but at 6 percent vs. 10 percent (my prior estimate), I’m not sure that I should totally trust the precision and update my values. But I think that nevertheless this study converges upon the same qualitative result: white Cubans, like white Latin Americans in generally, seem to usually exhibit non-trivial amounts of non-European ancestry.
But in the interests of moving the discussion forward, the commenter who brought the above paper to my attention supplied two 23andMe genotypes of Cuban Americans: herself and her husband. I will now refer to her as “Cuba 1” and her husband as “Cuba 2.” I created a pooled data set of the following populations:
Utah Whites HapMap
Mandenka HGDP
Yoruba HapMap & HGDP
Japanese and Chinese HGDP
Maya HGDP
Surui HGDP
Gujarati HapMap
French Basque
Spanish populations
After merging the marker set was reduced to 200,000. This is kind of overkill for inter-continental differences, but that’s fine. I ran ADMIXTURE up to K = 7, and did PCA for 10 dimensions. All the final results can be found here.
ADMIXTURE stopped being informative after K = 6 (Yoruba substructure started shaking out at K = 7). Here are the full results:
Cuba 2 has the most African ancestry of any non-African in the sample. Additionally, note his elevated Amerindian ancestry. This is even more notable, since it is not present in the Spanish samples. The patterns are just as clear in the PCA (the two Cubans are circled).
I’ve only labeled the Spanish individuals for the second plot, which is a zoom in. The African and Amerindian ancestry of Cuba 2 is clear in the PCA and ADMIXTURE. Cuba 1 does seem to have some African ancestry…but she could just as well be a Spaniard with African ancestry via the Moorish period. I do believe that the Moors did introduce African ancestry into Spain. Why? Below are individual plots, for Basque vs. non-Basque Spaniards (with Cuba 1 and Cuba 2):
Overall, it looks to be that Cuba 2 is 5-10 percent non-white. Cuba 1 definitely has more non-white ancestry than the typical white American, but can arguably simply be on one range of the distribution within Spain. Further analysis of the admixture pattern on the chromosomal level would answer this question (post-Columbian admixture would not have recombined against the European genetic background as much). Neither Cuba 1 or Cuba 2 seems to have Chinese ancestry. Rather, their “Asian” in 23andMe is almost certainly Amerindian. This is definitely the case for Cuba 2. Cuba 1 looks to be the “noise” level for that component (this increases my estimate of the probability that the African admixture is old, and Moorish era, because post-Columbian admixture probably manifested in tri-raciality).
If you are a white Latin American, I invite you to send me your genotype at contactgnxp -at- gmail -dot- com. Especially if you have been told you are “pure Spanish.”
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
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French
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Japanese
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Vietnamese
How confident are we that the extant population of Spain is a good match to the ancestors of the white Latin Americans? As far as I understand, the colonies have been settled by disproportionate numbers of Iberian conversos and moriscos (Sephardic Jews and Muslim Moors who were forced to convert to Christianity but then still purged from the “sacred soil of the Catholic Monarchies”). Crypto-Sephardic residents of Nuevo Leon / New Mexico are particularly well documented at a genetic level. The first US synagogue, in Rhode Island, has been built by South American Sephardim. And the fortifications of San Juan, PR, have been designed and built by Moors.
These people, possibly with a greater North African heritage, were being expelled out of the ancestral lands anyway. Many went to the Maghreb of course, but many chose the Americas.
You should include a Moroccan or otherwise native North African sample. Without a North African sample West Africans act as proxy for some of that North African ancestry that does exist in Iberia, specially the Western third (Portugal, Galicia, Extremadura, LeĂłn, etc.) Doing that your analysis would become more precise and you could make better informed claims.
I was reading through all the entry and there was no mention to the rather surprising notable West African component in Iberians other than Basques. For my somewhat trained eye it is clear that this is a proxy for North African ancestry and not directly West African ancestry. This is demonstratedly also the case in Canary Islands, at least to a large extent, and, by extension in Cuba (which is nearly identical to your average Canarian), at least Cuba-1. Cuba-2 seems actually admixed at low levels and both seem to have some Amerindian ancestry not existent in Spain.
References or further reading at FWTWWA:
http://forwhattheywereweare.blogspot.com.es/2011/12/north-african-genetics-through-prism-of.html
http://forwhattheywereweare.blogspot.com.es/2011/04/africanness-of-europeans-and-west.html
http://forwhattheywereweare.blogspot.com.es/2011/04/canarians-nw-africans-iberians-etc-from.html
#1, i’ve seen stuff like that, and the iberian ancestry in latin america looks atypical (aside from particular exceptions like you’ve mentioned).
#2, aside from mozabites the african samples don’t intersect with enough SNPs to do good ADMIXTURE. though there is enough for PCA, so i’ll check on that later.
It’s been a modus operandi of imperial rulers of all epochs, to push disloyal ethnic and religious groups to the remote frontiers and colonies, where they would come to identify with the empires rather than to oppose them. Shakh Abbas and Joseph Stalin resettled warlike tribes in a remarkably similar manner, if 500 years apart. Great Britain offered American colonies to its dissidents, and Russian Empire resettled its dissidents such as the Molokans in the newly-conquered lands South of the Caucasus.
A purge of the imperial subjects of Jewish ancestry happened in many corners of the world too. This is how, for example, a common breast cancer-predisposing mutation, which dates back to the Babylonian Exile of the Jews, spread all across the globe, becoming the most common risk factor not only in Latin America, but also in India and Malaysia (presumably with the exiles from portugal). Russian Empire also barred Jews from its “sacred lands” but kept its frontier in Siberia and in the South open.
So it may be expected that any historic frontier / colonial population may be somewhat of an outlier…
I think that Dm is referring to the gene BRCA1. According to an article in the European Journal of Genetics ( 1 December 2010) this mutation first appeard in northern Europe about 1800 years ago. It entered the Ashkenazic Jewish gene pool between 400 and 500 years ago.
New York Cubans might tend to be people who don’t feel as welcome in Miami, perhaps because they tend to be less white than the Miami Cuban power elite.
I looked at Wikipedia’s lists of prominent Cuban-American politicians, most of the Floridians. For about a dozen who had pictures on Wikipedia, I noticed only one that, with my mulattodar turned up to eleven, might have struck me as possible a tiny bit sub-Saharan African. Everybody else looked like average American white people.
In contrast, I looked at pictures of post Jackie Robinson Cuban baseball players like Minnie Minoso and Tony Oliva. They tend to be pretty black. More recent American-raised Cuban ballplayers like Jose Canseco and Rafael Palmeiro tend to be pretty white, because they come from the exile class.
Something similar is true with Dominicans. Most Dominican ballplayers from the D.R. are quite black, but Dominicans in the U.S. tend to be mixed (American-born Alex Rodriguez is more representative of the color of the typical Dominican-American than Sammy Sosa).
I’d love to see a similar study on “Italian”-Americans (many, if not most, are Sicilian, actually–like my in-laws.) Also ask fellow “Italian” Umberto Bossi of the “Northern League” if they claim Sicilians. Here’s a story on famous “white” Italian-American, Louis Prima, from my home town of New Orleans and whose parents came over on the same boats with the ancestors of some of my in-laws:
http://www.hoyhoy.com/artists/prima.htm
(Just hoping to stir things up! To make them as interesting and raucous as some of our intra-family gatherings!)
Latin America is a world in itself. Brazil alone is a bigger territory than Continental United States and there’s more genetic diversity in Brazil than in the United States. There are more “pure’ Amerindians in Brazil than in the entire North America Region (Mexico, United States and Canada) because we have the Amazon. There are more Blacks and genuine African culture in places like Salvador da Bahia and Rio de Janeiro than in any Northern American city. We have a full contingent of Asian, Japanese genetics and there are more unmixed Brazilians of German ancestry in places in Southern Brazil than in little Switzerland and Gisele BĂĽndchen (6th generation Brazilian) is the most successful top model of the world. The ignorance of US people about Brazil and Latin America is quite curious. You can never try to compare different countries in a big part of the world as the same homogeneous bloc, in the same way you can’t compare Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Australia, Singapore because they are different countries in size, population and history. Last but not least I would like to remember Dm from the first post that the the first US synagogue was built by people expelled from Brazil after the Protestant Northern European and the Sephardi Jews lost a long war in Brazil after they dared to attack our Glorious Realms, the Brazilian Portuguese language is a war language in our enchanting part of America where we still are (since 1500) commanded by one of us, a Macho President representative of our own type of “Euro”Brazilian power miscegenated to be dominant and hegemonic.
Good digging, Charles 🙂 ! There are actually *two* BRCA1 mutations commonly found in Jewish “cancer families”. The one you looked up (traditionally known as 5382insC) is of Northern European origin indeed, and the Ashkenazi Jewish STR haplotypes appear to be derived from a Polish haplotype, most likely during the era of great pogroms in the XVII c. Of course 5382insC is absent from the Sephardic Jews, and from the Latin America.
The BRCA1 mutation I had in mind is more common, and more ancient, traditionally referred to as 185delAG. It (and the underlying STR haplogroup) is shared in Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, and for that matter in the Iraqi Jews too … and indeed in the Americas and in South Asia. The haplotype age, and the geographic distribution, are in good agreement, placing the emergence of the mutation to Mesopotamia after the Babylonian exile of 586 bc
It´s maybe a stupidy question, but… where is the midle-eastern (north-african and west-asia) in Iberians? – Or it looks average european at this level? And why is the south-asian componnent bigger in Utah white than in Iberians, if is more common in west-asia?
where is the midle-eastern (north-african and west-asia) in Iberians? – Or it looks average european at this level? And why is the south-asian componnent bigger in Utah white than in Iberians, if is more common in west-asia?
first, they weren’t in the sample. i wasn’t testing that question. as for the ‘south asian’ component, what that’s picking up is that there is a common element which spans indo-european populations, and drops off in south india and western europe. this shows up as ‘west asian’ in other runs.
@Dm
Thanks for calling my attention to 185delAG!
The introgression of 5382insC into the Ashkenazic population is estimated to have occurred between 1500 and 1600. This was a peaceful period for eastern Europe Jewry which was then concentrated in the Polish-Lithuanian Empire. The gene may have been introduced through conversions associated with the Novgorod Judaizing heresy. The converts, who were persecuted in Russia, sought refuge in the P-L Empire.
Please refer to my comments under “An Algorithm is just an Algorithm” which is an update to this blog entry.
Hi, sorry if this is written ackwardly, English isn’t my first language.
The two regions of Spain that sent the most colonists to the Americas in colonial times were Extremadura and AndalucĂa, especially the area around Seville. Those two regions are very over represented among colonists.
Extremadura with a population of half a million people in 1492, may have sent upt to 200 thousand during the next two centuries. Its population had been reduced by half at the end of the XVII century, no one knows how much because of emmigration and how much because of the war around the Spanish Portuguese border. Pizarro was from Extremadura.
After colonial times, there was massive emmigration in the second half of the XIX century and early XX century to Cuba and Argentina, back then Cuba was very prosperous because of sugar (and later also USA tourism) and Argentina because of its agricultural exports (Argentina became wealthy right after the invention of the Beefer ship.
At that time, most of the immigrants were from the north, mainly Galicians, and also Asturians and Basques (Basques were also over represented in colonial times, and were often the elite)
Also, persecuted minorities may have been over represented as immigrants in the first years of the Spanish Colonial empire, and the first ones to arrive have a greater impact, the later immigrants breed with the descendents of the first ones.
The 2 big differences between Argentina and the USA are:
1)Argentina before 1870 had a typical latin american population, whites, mestizos, blacks, it was something in between Chile and Paraguay racially, with some blacks too. It was very sparsely populated, 1.800.000 people in a territory half the size of India, (the other half of Argentina was still in control of amerindians, who had become dangerous horse riders like the natives in the west of the USA.
So, the millions of European immigrants who came here from 1880 to 1940 came to a country not empty with just a few “savages” like NZ or Australia, or populated mainly by pure europeans and their slaves like the USA, they came to a racially mixed latin american country, no matter how sparsely populated it was, it wasn’t a complete desert.
2) Argentina received different immigrants, mainly Italians, Spaniards, followed by a heterogenous group of central and eastern europeans.
Another issue is that in Argentina the whites are middle class and have european fertility rates, the non whites from provinces which didn’t receive that much european immigration have far more offspring. And also descendants of Bolivians, Paraguayans, Chilean and Peruvian immigrants are well over 2.5 million in a country of 40 million people.
It should be noted that most spanish ancestry in Cuba is from the Canary Islands, which is not really Spanish, since Canarians have indigenous “Guanche” admixture, of Berber origin, which is not present in Spaniards. In fact Canarians are about 18% indigenous. Also it should be noted that “African” here at low K’s and without another african sample, works as north-african, and not real sub-saharan.
I have been to Miami and met many Cuban Americans, and to me they struck me as visibly mixed race. Some of the elite Cuban Americans from cities like Coral Gables looked like unmixed Euorpeans, of the Mediterranean variety. But many of the Cuban Americans I met had obvious African and/or Native American admixture, despite the fact they would vehemently deny this. Just my thoughts. Still, Cuban Americans are on average much “Whiter” looking than Mexican Americans and Guatemalans and El Salvadorans.
@#16Wal D, What you’re saying is not true. I have lived most of my life in Miami, and the majority of the Cubans in Miami look European. They aren’t denying anything because the majority of the Cubans in Miami don’t have any African or Native American admixture.
Andy Garcia has a typical Miami Cuban looks. In Miami Cubans come in many different looks. We have blond, brunette, and red hair Cubans. Cuba didn’t only had immigration from Spain, many people from all over Europe immigrated to Cuba, but Iberian were the majority. In Miami Spaniards from the Canary Islands are constantly asked if they’re Cuban. They get confused for Cuban because we have the same accent and Canarians look like white Cubans, which isn’t odd because most white Cubans have ancestors from the Canary Islands, Spain.
Here are pictures of Miami Cubans. The vast majority look like the white Cubans you would meet in Miami. The Cubans in my list of pictures are regular middle class Cubans, not the elite Cubans. We do have mix race Cubans in Miami, but they’re not the majority.
All the Cubans in these pictures look European:
In this picture the first guy on the left is not Cuban
You can also look up other white Cubans like Gelet Martinez, Marili Cancio, Carlos Ponce, Raul Esparza, Bronson Arroyo, Jose Diaz Balart, William Levy, Cari Dominguez, Carlos Eire, Daniella Garcia, Dominik Garcia, Tico Torres, Raul de Molina, Eddie Cibrian, Lincoln Diaz Balart, Mario Diaz Balart, Albio Sieres, Robert Menendez, Otto Rich, Elizabeth Rebozo, Ana De Armas, Sisi Fleites, Ileana Ros, Elizabeth Caballero, Ana Quincoces Rodriguez, Raul Malo, Johnny Goudie, and Lisandra de la Cruz.