The admixture histories of Cabo Verde

From the 15th to the 19th century, the Trans-Atlantic Slave-Trade influenced the genetic and cultural diversity of numerous populations. We explore genomic and linguistic data from the nine islands of Cabo Verde, the earliest European colony of the era in Africa, a major Slave-Trade platform between the 16th and 19th centuries, and a previously uninhabited location ideal for investigating early admixture events between Europeans and Africans. We find that genetic admixture in Cabo Verde occurred primarily between Iberian and Senegambian populations, although forced and voluntary migrations to the archipelago involved numerous other populations. Inter-individual genetic and linguistic variation recapitulate geographic distribution of individuals’ birth-places across Cabo Verdean islands, suggesting that Kriolu language variants have developed together with genetic divergences. Furthermore, we find that admixture occurred both early in each island, long before the 18 th -century massive TAST deportations triggered by the expansion of plantation economy in Africa and the Americas, and after this era mostly during the abolition of the TAST and of slavery in European colonial empires. Our results illustrate how shifting socio-cultural relationships between enslaved and non-enslaved communities shaped enslaved-African descendants’ genomic diversity and structure on both sides of the Atlantic.