Community-initiated genomics.

Ancient DNA is used to connect enslaved African Americans to modern descendants.

Ship fever, confinement, and the racialization of disease.

This paper presents the case of ship fever as a disease whose colonial origins and description by English-speaking physicians contributed to the racialization of European and African bodies in the second half of the eighteenth century. Historicizing ship fever as a disease associated with the health of sympathetic White soldiers and sailors, and notions that enslaved Africans were less vulnerable to a disease caused by confinement, contributes to ongoing analyses of the intersection of medicine, race, and slavery in the British Atlantic world after the Seven Years' War.

A Legacy of Scientific Racism: William Osler's "An Alabama Student".

William Osler's essay "An Alabama Student" made John Young Bassett (1804-1851) a widely admired avatar of idealism in medicine. However, Bassett fiercely attacked the idea that all humans are members of the same species (known as monogenesis) and asserted that Black inferiority was a justification for slavery. Antebellum physician-anthropologists bequeathed a legacy of scientific racism that in subtler forms still runs deep in American society, including in the field of medicine.

The African American experience in reproductive medicine: provider, patient, and pipeline perspectives.

The goal of this Views and Reviews is to let colleagues and leaders well versed in the African American experience in reproductive medicine address the problems of racism affecting our trainees and patients and, more significantly, propose solutions. The areas in reproductive medicine that will be explored from the African American perspective include the pipeline of providers, health disparities, and access to infertility treatment.

Expanding Opportunities for American Descendants of Slavery to Build a More Inclusive and Diverse Global Health Workforce.

Historically, the terms African American and Black have been used interchangeably to describe any person with African ancestry living in the United States. However, Black Americans are not a monolith, and legitimate differences exist between those with generational roots in the United States and either African or Caribbean immigrants. American descendants of slavery (ADOS) are underrepresented in many fields, but I have noticed during my decades long career in global health that they are acutely absent in this field. Here, I offer seven recommendations to improve recruitment, retention, and advancement of ADOS in the global health field. Immediate implementation of these recommendations will not only bring diverse perspectives and immense capacity to the field but also allow ADOS an opportunity to engage in compelling and meaningful work and to collaborate with those from their ancestral homelands.

Ecological variation and institutionalized inequality in hunter-gatherer societies.

Research examining institutionalized hierarchy tends to focus on chiefdoms and states, while its emergence among small-scale societies remains poorly understood. Here, we test multiple hypotheses for institutionalized hierarchy, using environmental and social data on 89 hunter-gatherer societies along the Pacific coast of North America. We utilize statistical models capable of identifying the main correlates of sustained political and economic inequality, while controlling for historical and spatial dependence. Our results indicate that the most important predictors relate to spatiotemporal distribution of resources. Specifically, higher reliance on and ownership of clumped aquatic (primarily salmon) versus wild plant resources is associated with greater political-economic inequality, measuring the latter as a composite of internal social ranking, unequal access to food resources, and presence of slavery. Variables indexing population pressure, scalar stress, and intergroup conflict exhibit little or no correlation with variation in inequality. These results are consistent with models positing that hierarchy will emerge when individuals or coalitions (e.g., kin groups) control access to economically defensible, highly clumped resource patches, and use this control to extract benefits from subordinates, such as productive labor and political allegiance in a patron-client system. This evolutionary ecological explanation might illuminate how and why institutionalized hierarchy emerges among many small-scale societies.

That "Bulky Commodity, Tobacco".

Tobacco, like other popular commodities, both reflected the rhythms of early modern empires and contributed to them. People, goods, and ideas crossing the Atlantic Ocean often traveled as freight in vessels bound upon other business, and much of that was tobacco business. Using a variety of historical examples, the current article explores tobacco's economic, cultural, and labor-related worlds to show how one plant shaped institutions of human enslavement, altered colonial ecologies, offered new sensory possibilities, and ruined fortunes. Although now perhaps better known within medical contexts as a significant, preventable cause of death, tobacco as it is understood today is also a highly political, economic, and cultural product, characteristics that have shaped human relationships to the commodity over the centuries. The 17th and 18th centuries, for example, saw a dramatic rise in tobacco consumption in Europe alongside an influx of colonial natural products across the continent. The tobacco trade offered power and profit to some, exploitation and enslavement to others. It underwrote the rise of prominent merchant and political families while shaping the daily routines of countless enslaved men, women, and children tasked with growing the plant. Tobacco leaves also offered hopes of medical treatment and trustworthy business dealings, as well as a moment of respite on a long voyage. At every stage of its evolution into a global commodity, tobacco's meanings and roles changed, becoming more fully integrated into European empire and its structures of power and profit in the process.

Ancestry, health, and lived experiences of enslaved Africans in 18th century Charleston: An osteobiographical analysis.

OBJECTIVES: In 2013, the burials of 36 individuals of putative African ancestry were discovered during renovation of the Gaillard Center in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. The Charleston community facilitated a bioarchaeological and mitogenomic study to gain insights into the lives of these unknown persons, referred to as the Anson Street Ancestors, including their ancestry, health, and lived experiences in the 18th century. METHODS: Metric and morphological assessments of skeletal and dental characteristics were recorded, and enamel and cortical bone strontium stable isotope values generated. Whole mitochondrial genomes were sequenced and analyzed. RESULTS: Osteological analysis identified adults, both females and males, and subadults at the site, and estimated African ancestry for most individuals. Skeletal trauma and pathology were infrequent, but many individuals exhibited dental decay and abscesses. Strontium isotope data suggested these individuals mostly originated in Charleston or sub-Saharan Africa, with many being long-term residents of Charleston. Nearly all had mitochondrial lineages belonging to African haplogroups (L0-L3, H1cb1a), with two individuals sharing the same L3e2a haplotype, while one had a Native American A2 mtDNA. DISCUSSION: This study generated detailed osteobiographies of the Anson Street Ancestors, who were likely of enslaved status. Our results indicate that the Ancestors have diverse maternal African ancestries and are largely unrelated, with most being born locally. These details reveal the demographic impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Our analysis further illuminates the lived experiences of individuals buried at Anson Street, and expands our understanding of 18th century African history in Charleston.

Historical overview, current research, and emerging bioethical guidelines in researching the New York African burial ground.

OBJECTIVES: The issues addressed in this article are those related to the bioethical actions and decisions surrounding the excavation of the New York African Burial Ground (NYABG) in the 1990s, the significance of conducting research on historical African/African American remains, and the eminence of protecting newly discovered African American burial sites in the future for research purposes. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Skeletal (n = 419, at the time of excavation) and soil (n = 92) remains of the 17th and 18th century New York African Burial Ground were used to discuss the necessity of research on historical African/African American remains. DISCUSSION: Studying the remains of enslaved Africans is critical to understanding the biological processes and existence of all people. Researching the NYABG site, the oldest and largest burial site of free and enslaved Africans, illuminates the necessity and significance of scientific research on other historical African/African American cemeteries throughout the nation. The results of future research will provide a more profound sense of identity for a group of people who were forcefully severed from their genetic and cultural origins. This research will increase the representation of African descended people in genomic, anthropological, and cultural research, and ultimately help researchers to learn more about the origins of all humans.

Race Correction and Spirometry: Why History Matters.

In recent months, medical institutions across the United States redoubled their efforts to examine the history of race and racism in medicine, in classrooms, in research, and in clinical practice. In this essay, I explore the history of racialization of the spirometer, a widely used instrument in pulmonary medicine to diagnose respiratory diseases and to assess eligibility for compensation. Beginning with Thomas Jefferson, who first noted racial difference in what he referred to as "pulmonary dysfunction," to the current moment in clinical medicine, I interrogate the history of the idea of "correcting" for race and how researchers explained difference. To explore how race correction became normative, initially just for people labeled "black," I examine visible and invisible racialized processes in scientific practice. Over more than two centuries, as ideas of innate difference hardened, few questioned the conceptual underpinnings of race correction in medicine. At a moment when "race norming" is under investigation throughout medicine, it is essential to rethink race correction of spirometric measurements, whether enacted through the use of a correction factor or through the use of population-specific standards. Historical analysis is central to these efforts.

Anthropological genetics perspectives on the transatlantic slave trade.

During the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (TAST), around twelve million Africans were enslaved and forcibly moved from Africa to the Americas and Europe, durably influencing the genetic and cultural landscape of a large part of humanity since the 15th century. Following historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, population geneticists have, since the 1950's mainly, extensively investigated the genetic diversity of populations on both sides of the Atlantic. These studies shed new lights into the largely unknown genetic origins of numerous enslaved-African descendant communities in the Americas, by inferring their genetic relationships with extant African, European, and Native American populations. Furthermore, exploring genome-wide data with novel statistical and bioinformatics methods, population geneticists have been increasingly able to infer the last 500 years of admixture histories of these populations. These inferences have highlighted the diversity of histories experienced by enslaved-African descendants, and the complex influences of socioeconomic, political, and historical contexts on human genetic diversity patterns during and after the slave trade. Finally, the recent advances of paleogenomics unveiled crucial aspects of the life and health of the first generation of enslaved-Africans in the Americas. Altogether, human population genetics approaches in the genomic and paleogenomic era need to be coupled with history, archaeology, anthropology, and demography in interdisciplinary research, to reconstruct the multifaceted and largely unknown history of the TAST and its influence on human biological and cultural diversities today. Here, we review anthropological genomics studies published over the past 15 years and focusing on the history of enslaved-African descendant populations in the Americas.

Skin color and race.

Skin color is the primary physical criterion by which people have been classified into groups in the Western scientific tradition. From the earliest classifications of Linnaeus, skin color labels were not neutral descriptors, but connoted meanings that influenced the perceptions of described groups. In this article, the history of the use of skin color is reviewed to show how the imprint of history in connection with a single trait influenced subsequent thinking about human diversity. Skin color was the keystone trait to which other physical, behavioral, and culture characteristics were linked. To most naturalists and philosophers of the European Enlightenment, skin color was influenced by the external environment and expressed an inner state of being. It was both the effect and the cause. Early investigations of skin color and human diversity focused on understanding the central polarity between "white" Europeans and nonwhite others, with most attention devoted to explaining the origin and meaning of the blackness of Africans. Consistently negative associations with black and darkness influenced philosophers David Hume and Immanuel Kant to consider Africans as less than fully human and lacking in personal agency. Hume and Kant's views on skin color, the integrity of separate races, and the lower status of Africans provided support to diverse political, economic, and religious constituencies in Europe and the Americas interested in maintaining the transatlantic slave trade and upholding chattel slavery. The mental constructs and stereotypes of color-based races remained, more strongly in some places than others, after the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery. The concept of color-based hierarchies of people arranged from the superior light-colored people to inferior dark-colored ones hardened during the late seventeenth century and have been reinforced by diverse forces ever since. These ideas manifest themselves as racism, colorism, and in the development of implicit bias. Current knowledge of the evolution of skin color and of the historical development of color-based race concepts should inform all levels of formal and informal education. Awareness of the influence of color memes and race ideation in general on human behavior and the conduct of science is important.

Geopolitics of bitterness: Deciphering the history and cultural biogeography of Quassia amara L.

ETHNOPHARMACOLOGICAL RELEVANCE: Quassia amara L. recently came into the spotlight in French Guiana, when it became the object of a biopiracy claim. Due to the numerous use records throughout the Guiana shield, at least since the 18th century, a thorough investigation of its origin seemed relevant and timely. In the light of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Nagoya protocol, questions about the origin of local knowledge are important to debate. AIM OF THE STUDY: Defining cultural biogeography as the dynamics through space and time of biocultural complexes, we used this theoretical framework to shed light on the complex biogeographical and cultural history of Q. amara. We explored in particular the possible transfer of medicinal knowledge on an Old World species to a botanically related New World one by enslaved Africans in Suriname. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Historical and contemporary literature research was performed by means of digitized manuscripts, archives and databases from the 17th to the 21st century. We retrieved data from digitized herbarium vouchers in herbaria of the Botanic Garden Meise (Belgium); Naturalis Biodiversity Center (the Netherlands); Missouri Botanical Garden, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum (USA); Royal Botanic Gardens Kew (UK); the IRD Herbarium, French Guiana and the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle (France). Vernacular names were retrieved from literature and herbarium specimens and compared to verify the origin of Quassia amara and its uses. RESULTS: Our exploration of digitized herbarium vouchers resulted in 1287 records, of which 661 were Q. amara and 636 were Q. africana. We observed that the destiny of this species, over at least 300 years, interweaves politics, economy, culture and medicine in a very complex way. Quassia amara's uses are difficult to attribute to specific cultural groups: the species is widely distributed in Central and South America, where it is popular among many ethnic groups. The species spread from Central to South America during the early 18th century due to political and economic reasons. This migration possibly resulted from simultaneous migration by religious orders (Jesuits) from Central America to northern South America and by Carib-speaking Amerindians (from northern South America to Suriname). Subsequently, through colonial trade networks, Q. amara spread to the rest of the world. The absence of African-derived local names in the Guiana shield suggests that Q. africana was not sufficiently familiar to enslaved Africans in the region that they preserved its names and transferred the associated medicinal knowledge to Q. amara. CONCLUSIONS: Cultural biogeography has proven an interesting concept to reconstruct the dynamics of biocultural interactions through space and time, while herbarium databases have shown to be useful to decipher evolution of local plant knowledge. Tracing the origin of a knowledge is nevertheless a complex adventure that deserves time and interdisciplinary studies.

[Genetic traces of the trans-Atlantic slave trade]. / Les traces génétiques de la traite des esclaves - Chroniques génomiques.

More than 10 million enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas between 1500 and 1900. Recent genetic studies investigate regional African ancestry components in present-day Africa-Americans, and allow comparison with the extensive records documenting these deportations. The genetic evidence generally agrees with the historical records but brings additional insights in this dark episode of human history.

Chemistry and slavery in the Scottish Enlightenment.

The Scottish Enlightenment has long been identified with abolitionism because of the writings of the moral and economic philosophers and the absence of slaves in Scotland itself. However, Scots were disproportionately represented in the ownership, management, and especially medical treatment of slaves in the British Caribbean. Sugar and cotton flowed into Glasgow and young, educated Scots looking for work as traders, bookkeepers, doctors made the return trip back to the Caribbean to manage the plantations. Chemically trained doctors and agriculturalists tested their theories in the plantations and developed new theories based on their experimentation on the land and slaves. In foregrounding the participation of Scottish trained chemists in the practice of slavery, I argue that the development of eighteenth-century chemistry and the broader intellectual Enlightenment were inextricably entangled with the economic Improvement Movement and the colonial economy of the British slave trade.