Haven't read the other responses yet, but in my opinion, no way, I & I were definitely kidnapped from Africa and brought over here. That's not to say some of us, or our genes anyway, were not here before; there is strong evidence of that that has been collated by Van Sertima and others. But definitely masses of us were kidnapped from Africa and brought here to the west. Oral history alone is enough to confirm that, not to mention the many cultural continuities from language to food etc. that show that we are African people (eg. in Guyana we still eat fu fu, there are African words and grammatical patterns in our Creolese, etc.) In fact, through family oral history I even know the names of two of my earliest ancestors who were enslaved and kidnapped to the Corentyne area of the then-Dutch or British Guiana (don't know if it was Dutch or British at the time they were brought).