To: Maurice Winn who wrote (69881 ) 12/22/2010 10:20:53 AM From: Cogito Ergo Sum Read Replies (3) | Respond to Genetic studies also confirm the strong Portuguese racial influence in Brazilians. According to a study, at least half of the Brazilian population's Y Chromosome comes from Portugal. Black Brazilians have an average of 48% non-African genes, most of them may come from Portuguese ancestors.[53] The Portuguese were the largest European immigrant population in Brazil. In colonial times, over 600,000 Portuguese settled in Brazil, and most of them came during the gold rush .[42] They managed to be the only significant European population to populate the country during colonization. The Portuguese immigration was strongly marked by the predominance of men (colonial reports from the 16th and 17th centuries almost always report the absence or rarity of Portuguese women). The multiplication of descendants of Portuguese settlers happened through miscegenation with Black and Indian women. In fact, in colonial Brazil the Portuguese men competed for the women, because even among the African slaves the female component was a minority.[43] This explains why the Portuguese men left more descendants in Brazil than the Amerindian or African men did. The Indian and African women were "dominated" by the Portuguese men, preventing men of color to find partners with whom they could have children. Added to this, the "White" people had a better quality of life and therefore a lower mortality rate than the Black and indigenous population. Then, even though the Portuguese immigration during colonial Brazil was small (5 million Indians estimated at the beginning of colonization and 3 to 6 million Africans brought since then, compared to the descendants of the over 600,000 Portuguese immigrants) the "White" population (whose ancestry was predominantly Portuguese) was as large as the Black population in the early 19th century.[44] en.wikipedia.org
