I heard about the dna process before but this is the first special I've seen where they used it in conjunction with history, documentation, a family tree to trace back to before slavery in Africa. The dna bank (to my knowledge) is only filled with volunteers in Africa though in order to allow African Americans to trace their ancestry back to a specific tribe or area.


>>Did you by any chance catch pbs last night?
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>No, this was prompted by a question from a friend from Serbia. I guess he put it as a rhetorical question, but I thought I'd rather check.
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>>There was a special on tracing your roots for African Americans. As it turns out, most African Americans in the U.S. have less 'black' dna than many whites here do. Most are a mixture of European and African American dna. It was very interesting because they used the dna and family tree of a group of African Americans and traced their heritage back to before the slave trade. What amazed most was not that they had free African Americans in their ancestry (for the few free blacks during our history it was surprising the number who did), but that their ancestors who came from Africa where captured not by white men, but by warring tribes in Africa and then sold into slavery by their fellow blacks. It seems that even though we all learn it in school, most over time take on the common beliefs held (perpetuated by movies no doubt) instead of the reality.
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>Heard of this before, but not too long ago - was this a rerun? Or was it my wife who heard a brief rehash somewhere.