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Out of Africa -- but From Which Tribe?
Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was told that his ancestry was Nubian.
(By Justine Ide -- Harvard University Via Associated Press)
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Most black Americans descend from West Africa, where the vast majority of slaves were seized. After surviving the brutal transatlantic voyage to the Americas, they were forbidden from speaking the tribal languages from regions that are now known as Angola, Senegal, Ghana, Liberia, the Ivory Coast and Nigeria.
Millions of family histories were lost as hundreds of ethnic Africans blended into a single group.
Mitochondrial DNA can point the way home. While it makes up a tiny fraction of all DNA found in a cell, its link to maternal roots is crucial for black Americans. The maternal side of a black family almost always goes back to Africa, as opposed to the Y chromosome of the father.
Thirty percent of Y-chromosome tests in black Americans lead to Europe, the origin of white men who fathered mixed-race slaves -- often from rape.
African Ancestry is owned by Rick Kittles, who obtained exclusive rights to the most extensive database of individual African DNA sequences in the world. Kittles has refused to share his database, angering other researchers who have a much smaller pool of information from which to draw.
On its Web site, African Ancestry asserts that three years ago it was the first to offer testing. Its client list includes actors Whoopi Goldberg, Isaiah Washington, LeVar Burton and Chris Tucker; film director Spike Lee; and former U.N. ambassador Andrew Young.
But, Eileen Krause, a post-lab quality assurance manager at Family Tree DNA of Houston, another genetics testing company, sided with Ely, saying a test result from mitochondrial DNA "doesn't necessarily mean that you are from this tribe or that tribe."
Linking individuals to a tribe is "something that concerns us," Krause said. "We are not comfortable seeing a person get a result that might not be valid. We feel it's unethical. We're not going to wage war or anything like that, but we don't like it."
Gates, who worked with Ely and Kittles for his PBS documentary, "African American Lives," said they are honest men who disagree. But, he added, DNA testing without a historical analysis is useless.
"You can't use the test results alone without contextualizing it," he said. "These DNA tests are confusing, and you can get a confusing result. Without context, they can be misleading."
