Hans Jonatan was born into slavery on a Caribbean sugar plantation, but he died in a small Icelandic fishing village. During his 43 years, he fought for the Danish Navy in Napoleonic Wars, lost a landmark case for his freedom and somehow escaped to become a farmer in Iceland. It is unclear how he got there and where he is buried today. But his story, the story of the country’s first black man, is local lore, passed down from his Icelandic wife and two children to hundreds of descendants since his death in 1827. Today, Jonatan’s descendants mostly lack the dark skin and curly hair that made it clear he was the son of a black mother, an enslaved woman named Emilia Regina, and a white father, whose identity remains unknown, according to The Atlantic. But his great-great-great-great grandsons and granddaughters still have his DNA, and scientists have shown that it is possible to reconstruct parts of his genome from him living descendants. It is also possible to trace his mother’s ancestry in Africa. Humans share some 99.5 percent of their DNA with each other, so geneticists look for variations distinguishing one group from another in that 0.5 percent. No single descendant of Jonatan’s carries his original genome, but they all carry a small part. So the team stitched together sequences found in 182 different descendants to recreate 38 percent of the African half of his genome.
Thanks for reading InsideHook. Sign up for our daily newsletter and be in the know.
