Harvard African-American studies professor Henry Louis Gates continues on with his interest in ancestry testing, providing some updating for the preliminary data in my 2002 article. Gates writes:
* According to Ancestry.com, the average African American is 65 percent sub-Saharan African, 29 percent European and 2 percent Native American.
* According to 23andme.com, the average African American is 75 percent sub-Saharan African, 22 percent European and only 0.6 percent Native American.
* According to Family Tree DNA.com, the average African American is 72.95 percent sub-Saharan African, 22.83 percent European and 1.7 percent Native American.
* According to National Geographic's Genographic Project, the average African American is 80 percent sub-Saharan African, 19 percent European and 1 percent Native American.
Presumably, the National Geographic project is trying harder than the commercial projects to get a representative, non-self selected sample, so that sounds like the best set of numbers to use as a rule of thumb.
By the way, the notion that African Americans are about 1/5th white was an assumption of physical anthropologists back around 1950. DNA testing has just confirmed what your lying eyes tell you.
* According to AfricanDNA, in which I am a partner with Family Tree DNA, the average African American is 79 percent sub-Saharan African, 19 percent European and 2 percent Native American.
And for our African-American male guests, there has been still another astonishing fact revealed about their paternal ancestry -- their father's father's father's line -- through their y-DNA: A whopping 35 percent of all African-American men descend from a white male ancestor who fathered a mulatto child sometime in the slavery era, most probably from rape or coerced sexuality.