According to historical records of transatlantic slavery, traders forcibly deported an estimated 12.5 million people from ports along the Atlantic coastline of Africa between the 16th and 19th centuries, with global impacts reaching to the present day, more than a century and a half after slavery’s abolition. Such records have fueled a broad understanding of the forced migration from Africa to the Americas yet remain underexplored in concert with genetic data. Here, we analyzed genotype array data from 50,281 research participants, which—combined with historical shipping documents—illustrate that the current genetic landscape of the Americas is largely concordant with expectations derived from documentation of slave voyages. For instance, genetic connections between people in slave trading regions of Africa and disembarkation regions of the Americas generally mirror the proportion of individuals forcibly moved between those regions. While some discordances can be explained by additional records of deportations within the Americas, other discordances yield insights into variable survival rates and timing of arrival of enslaved people from specific regions of Africa. Furthermore, the greater contribution of African women to the gene pool compared to African men varies across the Americas, consistent with literature documenting regional differences in slavery practices. This investigation of the transatlantic slave trade, which is broad in scope in terms of both datasets and analyses, establishes genetic links between individuals in the Americas and populations across Atlantic Africa, yielding a more comprehensive understanding of the African roots of peoples of the Americas.

根据跨大西洋奴隶制的历史记录，在16世纪至19世纪之间，贸易商从非洲沿大西洋海岸线的港口强行驱逐了大约1,250万人，全球影响到今天，废除了奴隶制后一个半多世纪。这些记录激起了人们对从非洲被迫迁往美洲的广泛了解，但与遗传数据相结合仍未得到充分研究。在这里，我们分析了50281名研究参与者的基因型阵列数据，并与历史运输文件相结合，说明美洲的当前遗传环境在很大程度上与奴隶航行的文件所产生的期望相一致。例如，非洲奴隶贸易区和美洲下船区的人们之间的遗传联系通常反映了在这些地区之间被迫迁移的个人比例。虽然有些矛盾可以通过驱逐出境的额外记录来解释在美洲范围内，其他不和谐之处使人们深入了解了来自非洲特定地区的成活率和被奴役者的到达时间。此外，与非洲男子相比，非洲妇女对基因库的更大贡献在美洲各地有所不同，这与文献记载了奴隶制习俗的区域差异相一致。这项跨大西洋奴隶贸易的调查在数据集和分析方面都广泛，它建立了美洲个人与整个大西洋非洲人口之间的遗传联系，从而使人们对美洲人民的非洲根源有了更全面的了解。