Pale Skin/Black Genes: Yorkshire clan linked to Africa

By

Ogu Eji Ofo Anu

Cutting edge genetic research increasingly adds weight to the proposition that people of African origin have lived in Europe and Britain for centuries.

A study carried out by a team of experts from Leicester University published in European Journal of Human Genetics found that seven men bearing a rare Yorkshire surname carry a very rare genetic signature previously thought to express only in people of African origin.

Although the men appeared to have a shared common ancestor in the 18th Century, the African DNA lineage they carry probably arrived in Britain hundreds of years earlier.
The Y Chromosome:

The Y chromosome is a string of genetic material found only in males, which is passed down from father to son, more or less in its original form.

The Y chromosome accumulates small changes (as a result of mutations) in its DNA sequence, over the course of time. By analyzing these changes, scientists are able to study the relationships between different male lineages as well as population movements.

These period mutational changes that occur in the Y chromosome allow its categorization into different groups (called haplogroups) which, provide useful tools in determining a person’s geographical ancestry.

Certain haplogroups might be very common in, for example, East Asia and very rare in Europe. Inferences are made on a haplogroup`s geographical origin based on its prevalence in a particular region of the world. Although this is a crude way of deducing ancestral geographical origins, it represents the cutting edge of today’s genetic science.

Pale-Skin and Black Genes:

Haplogroup A1, is highly West African-specific. It is a very old haplogroup which presence is very rare even in the west African region.

There are only 25 other people known worldwide with this gene and they are all African. Yet, this recent study has sequenced this haplogroup in 7 pale-skin English men living in Yorkshire.

That an African specific gene which has only been sequenced in 25 Africans should be discovered in 7 white-men living in one small town in England is indeed highly significant and provocatively suggestive.

Family tree:

According to the BBC News-site which also reported on this study, the study began with one individual who had no knowledge of any African heritage in his family.

Upon sequencing the unusual haplogroup, the scientist decided to expand their study to determine the extent of the haplogroup’s presence in the genetic make-up of Yorkshire men.

Since sharing a surname significantly raises the likelihood of sharing the same ancestor and hence the same type of Y chromosome, the researchers started recruiting people with the same last name, which starts with “R” and originates in Yorkshire.

18 men were tested, seven carried the rare African haplogroup. This ratio represents a mind boggling percentage when one considers the rareness of this gene even in west Africa. It appears to indicate an early colonization of Yorkshire by people of west African descent.

An attempt to fit the men into a family tree suggests that they had shared a common ancestor as of the 18th century. Further analysis however confirms that the haplogroup had a presence on the British Isle that dated many centuries prior to the 18th.

Migration Routes:

Although majority of the Black people living in England today originated in Africa and the Carribean in the second half of the 20th century, there were also Africans living in Britain before the 20th Century.

One must not forget that the Ibero-maurisians who are believed to have settled the British Isle in the pre-historic times were mostly Black Africans who had crossed into Spain from North Africa and then crossed the Alps or sailed the North sea into the British Isle.

Traditions also insist that the Phoenicians, another group of Africans usually passed off by racist minded scholars as “brown mediterranean types” originally came from the Horn of Africa. Phoenicians were known to have colonized the British Isle and extracted precious minerals from its mines including tin.

Scottish and Irish legends also hold that certain Egyptians had also colonized the Isle as traders, and then later as political exiles. Those Egyptians were Black Africans many of whose latter-day descendants live with pale skins covering black genes.

The Roman Empire was largely situated in North Africa geographically speaking. Thus many African Romans had a great influence on the Roman Empire. A Black African lawyer from Mauritania named Spetimus Severus had ruled Roman Empire from the capital Roman and even established an illustrious dynasty of Black Roman rulers. At that time, Britain was an outlaying backwater territory of celtic and germanic barbarians with whom the Romans rarely interacted.

At one point, the Romans administrators of the British colony had built the Hadrian’s wall, an early fort used to control the movement of barbarian tribes. Black Roman soldiers of African descent garrisoned this fort. Thousands of those soldiers settled and had children in England with the locals. Recent studies have confirmed the African origin of many osteological and genetic samples recovered from Roman cemetries near the Hadrian’s wall.

One must recall the Moors who had ruled a great part of southern Europe for periods ranging between 300 – 800 years. These Moors were the light of dark-age Europe and introduced the ancient sciences, medicine, mathematics, architecture and luxury goods into Europe, even further afield from their southern European sphere of influence. Their contribution facilitated the birth of western Europe which is wrongly termed as the Renassiance.

Finally, mention must be made of the several thousand Africans who were subsequently kidnapped and trade with the connivance of the elites of Europe into enforced slavery between 1516 and 1830 AD.

The first (Unknown) Black President of the United States: Paleskins/Black Genes In Action:

Human migration history is very complex, particularly for an island nation such as England, and this study further debunks the idea of the Aryan white homogenous germanic English race. It demonstrates that underneath many pale skins lie black African genes!

For example, When scientists analysed the DNA of the third US president, Thomas Jefferson, they found that his Y chromosome belonged to a haplogroup known as K2.

Although Jefferson’s father claimed Welsh ancestry, genetics has disproved this claim as false since his Y-haplogroup is rare in Europe and has not yet been reported in Britain.

In fact, genetic studies show that Thomas Jefferson’s K2 haplogroup ultimately came from north-east Africa or the Middle East, the areas where it is most commonly found today. It is thus highly probably that Jefferson was a recent descent of some un-named and denied Somali, Kenyan, or Sudanese making him the first Black president of the United States.

Incidentally, Jefferson, a founding father of the United States and one of the better known writers and signatory of the US constitution had a known preference for African women that he had enslaved on his plantation. He actually fathered a whole tribe of unacknowledged “mulatto” children from those Black women many of whom he enslaved or sold.

Someone once said that terrible crimes have been aided and abetted under the ignorant white-out of racist prejudice.

Ogu Eji Ofo Anu
January 25th, 2007.

Sources:

BBC NEWS:
Published: 2007/01/24
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/6293333.stm

The African Land of Spain: http://www.africaresource.com/rasta/2006/08/25/the-african-land-of-spain/

The Black Romans: http://www.africaresource.com/rasta/2006/06/29/the-black-romans/

Blacks in Rome: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/tyne/wear/3181666.stm