Zipporah Potter Atkins (July 4, 1645 – January 8, 1705) was a free African American woman who owned land in colonial Boston, during a time when few women or African Americans owned land in the American Colonies. The purchase of her home, dated 1670, makes her the first African American to own land in the city of Boston, and with Anthony Johnson one of the earliest African-American landowners in what would become the United States.
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Nandi (c. 1760 – October 10, 1827) was a daughter of Bhebhe, a past chief of the Langeni nation and the mother of the famous Shaka, King of the Zulus.
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Billy Kersands (c. 1842 in Baton Rouge Louisiana, –1915 in Artesia New Mexico) was an African-American comedian and dancer. He was the most popular black comedian of his day, best known for his work in blackface minstrelsy.
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Present-day humans outside Africa descend mainly from a single expansion out ∼50,000–70,000 years ago, but many details of this expansion remain unclear, including the history of the male-specific Y chromosome at this time. Here, we reinvestigate a rare deep-rooting African Y-chromosomal lineage by sequencing the whole genomes of three Nigerian men described in 2003 as carrying haplogroup DE* Y chromosomes, and analyzing them in the context of a calibrated worldwide Y-chromosomal phylogeny. We confirm that these three chromosomes do represent a deep-rooting DE lineage, branching close to the DE bifurcation, but place them on the D branch as an outgroup to all other known D chromosomes, and designate the new lineage D0.
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