The Manhattan African Burial Ground Just Got DNA Tested — And the Results Are Shocking

The Manhattan African Burial Ground Just Got DNA Tested — And the Results Are Shocking

DNA Beneath Manhattan: The African Burial Ground Is Revealing a History New York Forgot

For centuries, Manhattan built itself upward while thousands of African lives disappeared beneath it.

Streets were laid over them.

Buildings rose above them.

Businesses opened.

Government offices were constructed.

The city expanded, modernized, and eventually became one of the most powerful cities on Earth.

But underneath lower Manhattan was a cemetery that told a completely different story.

In 1991, construction workers preparing the site for a federal office building made an extraordinary discovery: human remains buried roughly 30 feet beneath the modern city.

The discovery eventually revealed the African Burial Ground, a six-acre cemetery that had been used during the colonial era by Africans and African Americans. The National Park Service estimates that the cemetery contained as many as 15,000 burials.

Suddenly, the history of Black New York was no longer something that could be reconstructed only from scattered documents.

It was beneath the city’s streets.

And the bones had something to say.

They revealed evidence of hard labor, disease, malnutrition, injury, childhood hardship, and the lives of people whose names had largely disappeared from the written record.

But then scientists asked another question.

Where did these people come from?

For years, the conventional story emphasized West and Central Africa as the primary ancestral regions of enslaved Africans brought to the Americas.

The genetic evidence emerging from the African Burial Ground suggested something more complicated.

Research led by Howard University geneticist Fatimah Jackson examined mitochondrial DNA—the genetic material passed through the maternal line—and found evidence pointing to African origins that were geographically broader than a simple West African story. Jackson has described maternal lineages represented among African Americans as coming from West, Central, East, Southern, and North Africa, while emphasizing that West and Central Africa account for the majority.

That distinction matters.

Because the story of the African diaspora was never as simple as a line drawn from one coastline to one continent.

It was a massive human movement involving people from many societies, regions, languages, and cultures.

And beneath Manhattan, some of those lost connections may still be recoverable.

The Discovery Nobody Expected

The story begins in 1991.

A federal office building was being planned at 290 Broadway in lower Manhattan.

Construction was proceeding when workers encountered human remains.

They were not isolated fragments.

They were intact burials.

Archaeologists soon realized they were looking at something extraordinary.

The remains belonged to Africans and African Americans who had been buried there during the colonial period.

The cemetery had existed for generations.

And somehow, the modern city had grown over it.

The National Park Service describes the African Burial Ground as the nation’s earliest and largest known African American cemetery. Excavations in 1991 and 1992 recovered the remains of 419 men, women, and children, nearly half of them children under twelve.

That number alone is difficult to comprehend.

Four hundred nineteen people.

Children.

Mothers.

Fathers.

Workers.

Elders.

People who had lived in colonial New York.

People who had built families.

People who had been enslaved.

People who had been free.

People who had been buried by relatives and friends.

And for generations, the city above them barely remembered that they existed.

The discovery changed that.

The Community Refused to Let Them Disappear Again

The excavation quickly became more than an archaeological project.

It became a battle over who had the right to decide what happened to the dead.

Construction interests wanted the project to continue.

Members of New York’s Black community saw something entirely different.

They saw ancestors.

They saw a sacred burial ground.

They saw people whose descendants had been denied access to much of their own history.

Activists, clergy, historians, politicians, and community members pushed for the remains to be treated with dignity.

The controversy eventually reached Congress.

The excavation was halted in important portions of the site, and Howard University became central to the scientific study of the remains.

That decision would prove enormously important.

The research was placed under the leadership of bioarchaeologist Michael Blakey and the W. Montague Cobb Biological Anthropology Laboratory at Howard University.

The project was unusual not simply because of the science being conducted, but because of the relationship between researchers and the descendant community.

Instead of treating the dead as objects to be extracted, catalogued, and stored, the project wrestled openly with the ethical question of who should control research involving the remains of enslaved people.

That question still matters today.

Who speaks for the dead?

Who decides what can be learned from their bones?

And when scientific knowledge conflicts with cultural or spiritual concerns, whose voice should matter most?

The African Burial Ground forced America to confront those questions decades before similar debates became widespread.

The Bones Told a Brutal Story

The remains themselves contained information that documents had never preserved.

Bones record hardship.

Teeth record aspects of childhood environment.

Skeletal injuries can reveal physical labor.

Patterns of disease can reveal the conditions in which people lived.

The Howard University research found evidence that life for many of the people buried at the site was physically demanding and often dangerous. The National Park Service summarizes the research bluntly: work was hard, life was short, and some people experienced violent deaths.

The skeletons showed signs of nutritional stress.

They showed injuries.

They showed repetitive physical strain.

They revealed that children were not necessarily protected from the demands of colonial labor.

These were not abstract statistics.

A damaged vertebra belonged to someone.

A damaged joint belonged to someone.

A child’s developing skeleton carried the biological evidence of a childhood lived under conditions that could permanently affect the body.

The written record might identify a person simply as enslaved.

The bones could reveal what that condition actually did to the human body.

And that is one of archaeology’s most powerful abilities.

It can recover evidence that people in power never bothered to write down.

Then Came the Genetic Question

The next mystery was ancestry.

The transatlantic slave trade was enormous.

Captives were taken from multiple regions of Africa and transported through different Atlantic routes.

European traders and American enslavers frequently recorded people according to their own categories.

Names were changed.

Family relationships were broken.

Languages were ignored.

Ethnic identities were sometimes reduced to vague labels.

The documentary record therefore contains enormous gaps.

Genetics offers another kind of evidence.

Mitochondrial DNA is especially interesting because it follows the maternal line.

A mother passes her mitochondrial DNA to her children, although only daughters pass it on to the next generation.

This creates a genetic trail through maternal ancestry.

When Jackson and other researchers examined mitochondrial DNA associated with African American populations and the African Burial Ground research, the results reinforced an important point:

African ancestry in America cannot be reduced to a single geographic origin.

Jackson has described finding maternal lineages connected to populations across multiple regions of Africa, including West, Central, East, Southern, and North Africa, while stressing that West and Central Africa remain the majority.

That is a very different statement from saying that the people buried in Manhattan were “not West African.”

They were.

West African origins are strongly represented in the broader history of the transatlantic slave trade.

The important discovery is that the picture is broader than that.

The African continent is enormous.

Its societies were diverse.

And the people caught in the slave trade came from many different places.

The Soil Became Part of the Evidence

There is another remarkable development in Jackson’s work.

The original human remains were reburied in 2003.

That meant researchers could no longer treat the skeletons as an endlessly available scientific collection.

But material gathered during the original excavation remained.

Including soil.

And burial soil can contain biological traces.

When a human body decomposes, biological material enters the surrounding environment.

Microbes interact with tissues.

DNA and other molecular signatures can persist under some conditions.

Jackson and collaborators have explored the potential of this material, including the biological information preserved in grave soil. A 2025 study by Carter K. Clinton and Fatimah Jackson examined persistent human-associated microbial signatures in burial soils from the African Burial Ground.

This is important because it shows how the site can continue producing scientific information even after the human remains themselves have been returned to the ground.

The cemetery is not simply an archaeological site frozen in 1991.

It remains a source of questions.

And new technologies can sometimes extract information that earlier researchers could not.

But DNA Is Not a Magic Time Machine

This is where the story requires caution.

It is tempting to say that scientists took DNA from the African Burial Ground and suddenly discovered exactly where every person came from.

That is not what happened.

Genetic ancestry is complicated.

Mitochondrial DNA represents only one maternal line.

It does not provide a complete picture of a person’s ancestry.

A person’s genome contains many ancestral lines, most of which are not represented by mitochondrial DNA.

And genetic similarity to present-day populations does not automatically mean an individual’s ancestors came from exactly the same modern political country.

Modern national borders are relatively recent.

Africa has experienced enormous migration and population movement for thousands of years.

So when scientists identify genetic relationships to particular African populations, they are interpreting patterns of genetic similarity—not reading a birthplace directly from a chromosome.

That distinction is critical.

The power of the African Burial Ground research does not come from producing a simplistic answer.

It comes from demonstrating how much more complicated the answer is.

A Continent Instead of a Single Story

For generations, people searching for African ancestry were often forced to work with incomplete records.

An enslaved ancestor might appear in a document with no African birthplace.

Another might be identified only by a first name.

Another might be listed by an enslaver’s surname.

A family could be separated by sale.

A child could disappear from one record and appear years later in another.

The paper trail was broken deliberately and repeatedly.

Genetics cannot repair all of those gaps.

But it can sometimes reveal relationships and population histories that written documents cannot.

And this is where the African Burial Ground becomes more than a New York story.

It becomes a story about the African diaspora itself.

The people brought to North America were not a single population.

They came from a continent containing thousands of communities and cultures.

They spoke different languages.

They practiced different religions.

They possessed different agricultural knowledge.

They had different traditions.

They had different physical appearances.

They carried different memories.

Then the slave trade forced many of them into the same brutal system.

From that violence emerged new communities in the Americas.

African American culture did not come from one place.

It developed from many African traditions interacting with European, Indigenous, and other influences under conditions of slavery, resistance, survival, and adaptation.

The DNA is one more piece of evidence for that complexity.

The Descendants Were Part of the Science

Perhaps one of the most important lessons of the African Burial Ground is not genetic at all.

It is ethical.

The descendant community fought to have a voice.

That changed the project.

Michael Blakey’s work became associated with a model in which descendant communities were treated as important participants rather than outsiders to the scientific process. Contemporary accounts of the project describe how activists and Black New Yorkers pushed for control over the treatment and study of the remains.

This matters because scientific research has not always treated marginalized communities fairly.

Human remains have historically been collected without meaningful consent.

Bodies have been measured, categorized, stored, and studied.

Sometimes the people being studied had no say whatsoever.

The African Burial Ground project challenged that tradition.

The question was no longer simply:

“What can we learn from these bones?”

It became:

“How should we learn from them, and for whom?”

That distinction changed the meaning of the research.

The Return Home

After more than a decade of scientific study, the 419 excavated individuals were returned to the ground.

In October 2003, they were reinterred during the Rites of Ancestral Return.

Thousands of people participated.

The coffins were hand-carved in Ghana.

Personal messages from living people were buried alongside the remains.

It was not simply a scientific conclusion.

It was a homecoming.

The people who had spent centuries beneath Manhattan’s streets were finally given a public memorial.

In 2006, the African Burial Ground was proclaimed a national monument.

The site now tells visitors something that the city had once forgotten.

Black people were present in New York from the city’s earliest colonial history.

They were not peripheral to the city’s development.

They were part of it.

What the DNA Changes

So what does the genetic research actually change?

It changes the scale of the story.

Instead of imagining African American ancestry as a single line leading back to one region, the evidence points toward a far more complicated network.

West Africa mattered enormously.

Central Africa mattered enormously.

But the genetic history of African Americans also contains connections reaching farther across the continent.

That matters for descendants trying to understand their own history.

It also matters for historians.

Because written records are not neutral.

They reflect what governments, traders, enslavers, and institutions chose to record.

They preserve some information and erase other information.

A shipping document might record a cargo.

A plantation ledger might record an enslaved person’s labor.

A census might record a name.

But none of those documents necessarily preserves the full identity of the human being.

Genetics offers another form of evidence.

Not perfect evidence.

Not complete evidence.

But evidence nonetheless.

The Ground Is Still Speaking

The most remarkable thing about the African Burial Ground is that the story is not finished.

The remains were reburied.

The memorial stands.

The national monument exists.

But research continues.

Soil can be studied.

Archives can be reopened.

DNA techniques can improve.

Historical records can be digitized.

Researchers can compare genetic patterns with archaeological and documentary evidence.

Every new method creates another opportunity to recover something that was previously invisible.

That is what makes the African Burial Ground so important.

The city tried, intentionally or not, to move forward without remembering everything beneath its streets.

But the ground remembered.

The bones remembered.

The teeth remembered.

The soil remembered.

And now, science is learning how to listen.

A Different Kind of New York History

Walk through lower Manhattan today and it is difficult to imagine colonial New York.

Skyscrapers dominate the horizon.

Cars move through crowded streets.

Tourists take photographs.

Workers hurry between offices.

Millions of people pass through the financial district every year.

But beneath that modern city lies another Manhattan.

A Manhattan where enslaved Africans worked.

Where free Black people built families.

Where African traditions survived.

Where people struggled, worshiped, loved, suffered, and died.

And beneath the streets is a cemetery where thousands of them were laid to rest.

Their graves survived even when their names did not.

That may be the most powerful lesson.

A city can erase a neighborhood from its maps.

A government can lose documents.

An enslaver can change a person’s name.

A family can be separated.

A historical narrative can leave people out.

But none of those things guarantees complete erasure.

Sometimes the evidence remains in the ground.

Sometimes it remains in the genes.

Sometimes it remains in a story passed from grandmother to grandchild.

Sometimes it remains in the shape of a bone.

And sometimes it survives in soil that nobody thought would ever speak.

The History Was Always Bigger

The African Burial Ground does not give us a simple answer to the question of where every African American ancestor came from.

It gives us something more valuable.

It gives us evidence that the real answer was never simple.

The ancestors of African Americans came through multiple routes and from multiple African regions.

They were individuals before they were statistics.

They belonged to communities before the slave trade categorized them.

They carried languages, beliefs, skills, memories, and family histories.

Some of those things were deliberately destroyed.

Others survived.

And three centuries later, scientists are still finding traces of them.

The extraordinary part is not that DNA somehow contradicted history.

It is that DNA exposed how incomplete the written version of history had always been.

The records told part of the story.

The bones told another part.

The soil told another.

And the DNA is helping connect those pieces.

That is why the African Burial Ground matters far beyond Manhattan.

It is not simply a cemetery.

It is an archive.

It is a place where the people erased from the official story left evidence that could not be completely destroyed.

They left their bones.

They left their biology.

They left their descendants.

And they left questions.

For centuries, nobody had the technology—or perhaps the willingness—to ask all of them.

Now researchers are beginning to ask.

And beneath one of the world’s greatest cities, the answers are slowly emerging.

Not all at once.

Not perfectly.

But piece by piece.

Line by line.

Sequence by sequence.

The city may have built over their graves.

History may have forgotten their names.

But the evidence remained.

And now, after centuries of silence, the ground is finally being allowed to speak.