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A Trail Gone Cold
Against the odds, a tiny Icelandic town speaks of a local Black ancestor. Geneticists and historians combine forces to uncover the man’s eventful life.
The fifth, a young man not much older than Hans himself, ended up siding with his seniors but also made room in his comments for a dissenting argument that Caribbean slaves arriving on Danish soil could only be servants rather than slaves—precisely the conclusion that Crown Prince Frederick had drawn in his not-at-all-fictional letter. To be sure, the unusual circumstances of Hans Jonathan’s background, in conjunction with his excellent choice of hiding place and the large number of descendants he has, all ensured that this was a relatively clear-cut demonstration of how the DNA of a single ancestor could be disentangled from everything else going on in a population’s collective genes. As the editors of Nature Genetics commented in a short editorial accompanying the release of the 2018 article on the background of Hans Jonathan, the project crucially involves “our interwoven genomic and social histories.” In other words, DNA is something of a time-capsule of all of our biological ancestors.
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