This work was undertaken to ascertain to what degree the physical appearance of a
Brazilian individual was predictive of genomic African ancestry. Using a panel of 10
population-specific alleles, we assigned to each person an African ancestry index (AAI). The
procedure was able to tell apart, with no overlaps, 20 males from northern Portugal from 20
males from São Tomé Island on the west coast of Africa. We also tested 10 Brazilian
Amerindians and observed that their AAI values fell in the same range as the Europeans …

The population of Brazil, formed by extensive admixture between Amerindians, Europeans
and Africans, is one of the most variable in the world. We have recently published a study
that used ancestry-informative markers to conclude that in Brazil, at an individual level, color,
as determined by physical evaluation, was a poor predictor of genomic ancestry, estimated
by molecular markers. To corroborate these findings we undertook the present investigation
based on data from 12 commercially available forensic microsatellites that were utilized to …