Who were the Gulf of Guinea West African (1500 BC to 1500 AD)?

Gulf of Guinea West African is one of the 50 curated source populations in the Classical Antiquity era of Ancient Ancestry, Ancestrify's qpAdm analysis: a group of published genomes pooled as a single reference the model can test your genome against. These are ancient individuals from one archaeological context wherever the record holds them, and present-day genomes standing in where it does not, which the description on this page says.

Does Gulf of Guinea West African in my result mean they were my ancestors?

No. A source population is a reference the model tests against, never a statement about who your ancestors were. A coefficient on this source means the ancestry those burials represent helps explain your genome to within statistical noise: similar ancestry composition, not descent from those individuals. Ancestrify never claims a population is your ancestor.

What does a Gulf of Guinea West African percentage in a qpAdm model mean?

qpAdm estimates the mixture proportions that best explain your genome as a combination of the chosen sources, given a fixed set of outgroup (right) populations, and reports a p-value for whether the model is statistically acceptable together with a standard error for every proportion. The percentage is that estimated share, with its uncertainty published beside it.

How do I get a qpAdm model that uses Gulf of Guinea West African?

Order Ancient Ancestry, Ancestrify's qpAdm analysis (€29.99, one-time), and upload the raw file you already have from a consumer test. Your genome is merged into the AADR reference panel and modelled across both eras; each era's model is built from that era's source populations, so a model for the Classical Antiquity era draws on Gulf of Guinea West African where it improves the fit.

Can I model Gulf of Guinea West African ancestry for free first?

Yes. The Ancestrify Lab runs Global25 admixture calculators, a nearest-populations distance tool and an AdmixTools 2 workbench in your browser with no account, and several calculators cover the Classical Antiquity era. Those are G25 fits, not formal qpAdm models. Ancient Ancestry, the paid analysis, is the one with a p-value.

Ancestry populations · Classical Antiquity

Gulf of Guinea West African

The farming and ironworking peoples of the Nigerian forest belt, from the Nok to Ife and Benin, represented by present-day Yoruba, Esan and Igbo genomes. One of the 50 curated source populations in the Classical Antiquity era of Ancient Ancestry, Ancestrify's qpAdm analysis.

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Who they were

Artistic interpretation of the Gulf of Guinea West African (AI-generated artwork, not documentary evidence)

Period: 1500 BC to 1500 AD
Era in the analysis: Classical Antiquity
Region: Gulf of Guinea, from the Niger delta towards the Volta
Role in the model: Source (left) population, a reference qpAdm tests against

The forest belt along the Gulf of Guinea, from the Niger delta west towards the Volta, was home to some of the oldest farming and ironworking societies of West Africa. In central Nigeria the Nok culture, which flourished in the first millennium BC and into the early centuries AD, modelled lifelike terracotta figures and smelted iron, and the city of Ife, and later Benin, cast heads and plaques in copper alloy with astonishing skill. Their people spoke languages of the Niger-Congo family, worked iron and traded along the rivers and the coast. Ancient DNA from West Africa is extremely scarce: the first ancient genomes from the region, from four children at Shum Laka in Cameroon, were published only in 2020 (Lipson et al. 2020). The reference genomes here come from present-day Yoruba, Esan and Igbo people of southern Nigeria, who stand in for the peoples of this region before European contact.

Present-day West Africans, the Yoruba and the Mende among them, form a clade distinguished by admixture from a deep source (Lipson et al. 2020), and the expansion of the Bantu-speaking peoples began in western Africa some 6,000 to 4,000 years ago (Fortes-Lima et al. 2024). This ancestry is widespread today across Nigeria, Benin and Togo, and it is carried by many people of the Caribbean and the Americas whose ancestors were taken from the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra: Nigerian-related ancestry is more common in the Americas than shipping records alone would predict (Micheletti et al. 2020).

In Ancient Ancestry, Ancestrify's qpAdm analysis, Gulf of Guinea West African is a source in the "Classical Antiquity" era. The report shows its weight with a standard error and a Z-score, so you can see not only how much of the model it carries but how confidently that share is separated from zero, and a model that cannot support it is rejected rather than published. It is one of the era's West African sources, beside the Senegambian and Upper Guinea source; the African sources share a deep ancestry, so the model may divide one African signal among them and their weights are best read together with their standard errors.

Y haplogroup E1b1a and the mtDNA L lineages are characteristic of populations rich in this ancestry. A haplogroup alone is never evidence of a share.

In your report
The forest belt along the Gulf of Guinea, from the Niger delta west towards the Volta, was home to some of the oldest farming and ironworking societies of West Africa. In central Nigeria the Nok culture, which flourished in the first millennium BC and into the early centuries AD, modelled lifelike terracotta figures and smelted iron, and from about the twelfth century the city-states of Ife and Benin cast heads and plaques in copper and brass with astonishing skill. Their people grew yams, millet and oil palms, kept goats, worked iron and traded along the rivers and the coast, speaking languages of the Niger-Congo family. The reference genomes here come from present-day Yoruba, Esan and Igbo people of southern Nigeria, who stand in for the peoples of this region before European contact. This ancestry is widespread today across Nigeria, Benin and Togo, and is carried by many people of the Caribbean and the Americas whose ancestors were taken from the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra during the Atlantic slave trade.

Artwork is an AI-generated artistic interpretation informed by the archaeological record, not documentary evidence.

Where this population sits in the model

Ancient Ancestry, our qpAdm analysis, models your genome once per era. The Classical Antiquity era has 50 curated source populations, and Gulf of Guinea West African is one of them: every candidate model for that era is a combination of these sources, tested against a fixed set of outgroup populations, and only a model that passes the statistical fit check is published, with a p-value and a standard error on every proportion.

A reference, not a verdict: every population on this page is a source the model tests your genome against, a well-sampled point in ancient genetic space that a mixture of ancestries can be expressed in terms of. A weight on it means your genome is well described as partly resembling those people; it is never a statement that they, specifically, were your ancestors, and a population that fits well is not the only one that could.

Read how qpAdm works on the Ancient Ancestry page, or the definitions in the glossary.

Model it yourself for free

The Ancestrify Lab runs in your browser, with no account. Paste a Global25 row into an admixture calculator that covers the Classical Antiquity era, rank the closest ancient populations in the distance tool, or run f4, qpWave and qpAdm on the public panel in the AdmixTools 2 workbench. These are Global25 fits and exploratory statistics, not the formal qpAdm model of Ancient Ancestry.

Questions

Who were the Gulf of Guinea West African (1500 BC to 1500 AD)?
Gulf of Guinea West African is one of the 50 curated source populations in the Classical Antiquity era of Ancient Ancestry, Ancestrify's qpAdm analysis: a group of published genomes pooled as a single reference the model can test your genome against. These are ancient individuals from one archaeological context wherever the record holds them, and present-day genomes standing in where it does not, which the description on this page says.
Does Gulf of Guinea West African in my result mean they were my ancestors?
No. A source population is a reference the model tests against, never a statement about who your ancestors were. A coefficient on this source means the ancestry those burials represent helps explain your genome to within statistical noise: similar ancestry composition, not descent from those individuals. Ancestrify never claims a population is your ancestor.
What does a Gulf of Guinea West African percentage in a qpAdm model mean?
qpAdm estimates the mixture proportions that best explain your genome as a combination of the chosen sources, given a fixed set of outgroup (right) populations, and reports a p-value for whether the model is statistically acceptable together with a standard error for every proportion. The percentage is that estimated share, with its uncertainty published beside it.
How do I get a qpAdm model that uses Gulf of Guinea West African?
Order Ancient Ancestry, Ancestrify's qpAdm analysis (€29.99, one-time), and upload the raw file you already have from a consumer test. Your genome is merged into the AADR reference panel and modelled across both eras; each era's model is built from that era's source populations, so a model for the Classical Antiquity era draws on Gulf of Guinea West African where it improves the fit.
Can I model Gulf of Guinea West African ancestry for free first?
Yes. The Ancestrify Lab runs Global25 admixture calculators, a nearest-populations distance tool and an AdmixTools 2 workbench in your browser with no account, and several calculators cover the Classical Antiquity era. Those are G25 fits, not formal qpAdm models. Ancient Ancestry, the paid analysis, is the one with a p-value.

More populations from the Classical Antiquity era

Browse the full directory of source populations, or continue with another population from the same era: