Genes, chemical clues, and the filing of teeth into shapes all point to West Africa as the birthplace of these three individuals, although they were buried in a mass grave in colonial Mexico City.
By Lizzie WadeIn the late 1980s, workers excavating a new subway line in downtown Mexico City stumbled upon a long-lost cemetery.
Documents showed it had once been connected to a colonial hospital built between 1529 and 1531—only about 10 years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico—for Indigenous patients.
As archaeologists excavated the buried skeletons, three stood out. Their teeth were filed into shapes similar to those of enslaved Africans from Portugal and people living in parts of West Africa.