The Gullah study: 90.7% African, 8.0% European, 1.3% Native American, with Queen Quet as co-author (South Carolina Sea Islands, 2021)

SUMMARYThe Gullah study: 90.7% African, 8.0% European, 1.3% Native American, with Queen Quet as co-author (South Carolina Sea Islands, 2021) [Connections: Genetics (honest), Nov 5, 2026]

RECORDZimmerman, Schurr, Chen and others, including Queen Quet and David Reich, "Genetic landscape of Gullah African Americans," American Journal of Physical Anthropology 175(4):905–919 (2021), compared 883 Gullah, 1,322 Jackson Heart Study African Americans and 381 Sierra Leoneans. Gullah: 90.7% African, 8.0% European, 1.3% Native American; Jackson Heart Study: 82.2%, 16.3%, 1.4%. The authors call the Gullah "the highest average African ancestry proportion of any U.S. African American group studied to date." They tie the Native share to the record of Native enslavement and mixing in Charleston. On the X chromosome, Gullah European ancestry was 4.3% vs. 8.0% autosomal: a male-biased European contribution. Reference panels: CEU (European), YRI (African), and Mixtec, a Mexican people, for Native American (7 individuals after quality checks)

PATTERNthe most culturally intact Black Southern community, studied with its own leader on the author list, reads mostly West African with a small but confirmed Native share, measured against a Mexican, not a Southeastern, reference

LENS (WW9)Rule 14 in practice: the Gullah/Geechee Nation sat at the table

OPENthe paper says the usual Native proxies are far from the Southeastern source; it uses a statistical method (qpAdm) to correct for that, but a Southeastern ancient reference was not available

SOURCEZimmerman et al. 2021, PDF (Reich Lab).