the immigrants to the new world came largely from widely separated regions of the old world. in the americas, the immigrant populations began to mix among themselves and with the indigenous inhabitants of the continents. in the united states, for example, most people who identify as african american have some european ancestors, as revealed by genetic studies. in one analysis of those genetic markers that have differing frequencies between continents, european ancestry ranged from an estimated 7% for a sample of jamaicans to ~ 23 % for a sample of african americans from new orleans, where there was historically a large class of mixed race (now called louisiana creoles) (parra "et al." 1998).