The communities of African descent of Nor Yungas, Bolivia: an approach to its anthropogenetic study

Abstract

This paper presents an anthropogenetic study of African descent populations in the region of Nor Yungas, Bolivia. Emphasis is placed on the socio-historical frame, the methodology that was built with communities and participants, and the importance of returning results to the community. Our proposal was to bring a scientific tool that would be a contribution to the historical-cultural reconstruction of ancestral roots undertaken by the Afro-Bolivian communities for the last two decades, in pursuit of a greater visibility as a nation in the Plurinational State of Bolivia. Uniparental inheritance of genetic markers (mtDNA and Y chromosome STRs) were determined in order to estimate the geographic origin of the population. The results show that communities studied have a strong African descent, with a minoritary process of interbreeding with Native American and European.