A TWENTY-YEAR-OLD puzzle over Colombian ancestry has been solved. For most of the country, ancestry is straightforward: male European colonists arrived and married Colombian Indian women. The tale is borne out by genetic tests, which show that most Colombians inherited their maternally derived mitochondrial DNA from Indian women, while the men got their Y chromosomes from Europeans.
Antioquia province, in the north-west of the country, is different. Residents look more European, and their culture is more Spanish. Blood tests in the 1980s showed that 70 per cent of the population’s ancestors were European. Yet later genetic tests showed that most…
