I found an Igbo genome on the NIH website, and I just never got around to writing about it, though it’s positively fascinating. The Igbo people are (to my knowledge) located primarily in Nigeria, and when I initially started my work in genetics, I noticed some astonishing finds in Nigerian people, with some basically perfect matches to Norwegians and Japanese people. At this point, I’ve made perfect sense of how these things are possible, and they’re not at all inconsistent with accepted theories, they have nothing to do with slavery, and in particular, there’s academic support for a very early migration back to Africa from Asia about 70,000 years ago. My hypothesis is that many Northern Europeans were part of that same original group of people in Asia.

The Igbo genome suggests exactly this, since it is a 98% match to an Icelandic genome, many Swedes, and some Norwegians, Finns, and Danes (see left chart above). Moreover, if you reduce the match threshold to 90% of the genome, you find the Igbo genome is a match to the Munda people of India (see right chart above). This is perfectly consistent with the hypothesis of a migration back to Africa from Asia, which is again, at least supported by some academic research. Specifically, in this case, it suggests that the Ibgo are from India. You can supplement this with a hypothesis that the same original group of people from India separated, with some of them going to Scandinavia, and others going to Africa. Keep in mind, Iceland is far more insular than the rest of Scandinavia, so much so that Icelandic is a distinct language, that is close to Old Norse, a language from the Viking Age. And though I can’t find more than one Icelandic genome, common sense suggests the Icelandic people are extremely homogenous, and this is supported by the fact that inadvertent incest is a serious issue in Iceland. The point being that this is probably not a one-off, and moreover it can’t be, because the Igbo are plainly related to the Northern Europeans generally.

You can run this analysis using the software linked to in my paper, A New Model of Computational Genomics.

Here’s the dataset:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zwt1bcqqmqkleca/mtDNA.zip?dl=0