Mixed-race Brazilian
[2] According to some DNA researches, Brazilians predominantly possess a great degree of mixed-race ancestry, though less than half of the country's population classified themselves as "pardos" in the census.
Many came from Guinea or from West African countries - by the end of the eighteenth century many had been taken from Congo, Angola and Mozambique (or, in Bahia, from Benin).
[6][failed verification] In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a considerable influx of mainly European immigrants arrived in Brazil.
The numbers of Indigenous peoples[citation needed] and African slaves were much higher during Colonial Brazil.
For that reason the first interracial marriages[citation needed] in Brazil occurred between Portuguese males and Amerindian females.
Indians, mostly free men and mamelucos, predominated in the society of São Paulo in the 16th and early 17th centuries and outnumbered Europeans.
[citation needed] The influential families generally bore some Indian blood and provided most of the leaders of the bandeiras, with a few notable exceptions such as Antonio Raposo Tavares (1598–1658), who was European-born.
In 1835, Blacks would have made up the majority of Brazil's population, according to a more recent estimate quoted by Thomas Skidmore.
[16] The researchers however were cautious about its conclusions: "Obviously these estimates were made by extrapolation of experimental results with relatively small samples and, therefore, their confidence limits are very ample".
[18] According to an autosomal DNA genetic study from 2011, both "whites" and "pardos" from Fortaleza have a predominantly degree of European ancestry (>70%), with minor but important African and Native American contributions.
"Whites" and "pardos" from Belém and Ilhéus also were found to be predominantly European in ancestry, with minor Native American and African contributions.
The populations in the North consisted of a significant proportion of Native American ancestry that was about two times higher than the African contribution.
In this work we analyzed the information content of 28 ancestry-informative SNPs into multiplexed panels using three parental population sources (African, Amerindian, and European) to infer the genetic admixture in an urban sample of the five Brazilian geopolitical regions.
[22] It is important to note that "the samples came from free of charge paternity test takers, thus as the researchers made it explicit: "the paternity tests were free of charge, the population samples involved people of variable socioeconomic strata, although likely to be leaning slightly towards the ‘‘pardo’’ group".
[24] According to it the total European, African and Native American contributions to the Brazilian population are: According to another autosomal study from 2008, by the University of Brasília (UnB), European ancestry dominates in the whole of Brazil (in all regions), accounting for 65,90% of heritage of the population, followed by the African contribution (24,80%) and the Native American (9,3%).
A study from 1965, Methods of Analysis of a Hybrid Population (Human Biology, vol 37, number 1), led by the geneticists D. F. Roberts e R. W. Hiorns, found out the average the Northeastern Brazilian to be predominantly European in ancestry (65%), with minor but important African and Native American contributions (25% and 9%).
Krieger et al. (31, a study from 1965) studied a population of Brazilian northeastern origin living in São Paulo with blood groups and electrophoretic markers and showed that whites presented 18% of African and 12% of Amerindian genetic contribution and that blacks presented 28% of European and 5% of Amerindian genetic contribution (31).
At any rate, compared with these previous studies, our estimates showed higher levels of bidirectional admixture between Africans and non-Africans.
Most of them have origin in black women who escaped slavery and were welcomed by indigenous communities, where they started families with local amerindian men.
