Romani Exodus Began Fifth Century AD From India

To contact us Click HERE



What makes this probleminteresting is that the population was both dispersed but mobile and thisallowed any single unit to avoid outright absorption and assimilation.  Intermarriage took place often enough but itwas a single individual every few years and they would always move on severingany local ties.  Thus the populationremained internally more homogenous than would be expected.
They also arrived in Europe atmuch the same time as the Jews entered Europe from the Mediterranean. Both interacted throughout Europe and it will be instructive to compare the resultantgenetic legacy of the two peoples.  Both operatedstrategies that served to preserve their way of life and their success andfailure can be compared to some profit.
It is a reminder that peoples dotend to survive even if their name changes to confuse historians.  It has been popular to assume actualextinctions as a common occurrence.  Notso of course.  Even conquered peopleswould see their people enslaved but integrated all leading to inter marriage atworse.  Even driven out of a homeland thensaw them absorbed next door by a tribe eager to increase their strength to facethe conqueror.  There are exceptions butnot as common as claimed.
What is true here is that thefolk history and other clues all hang together.

European Romani exodus began 1,500 years ago
Posted by TANN
http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.ca/2012/12/european-romani-exodus-began-1500-years.html
Despite their modern-day diversity of language, lifestyle, andreligion, Europe's widespread Romanipopulation shares a common, if complex, past. It all began in northwestern Indiaabout 1,500 years ago, according to a studyreported on December 6th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, thatoffers the first genome-wide perspective on Romani origins and demographichistory.

The Romani represent thelargest minority group in Europe, consistingof approximately 11 million people. That means the size of the Romanipopulation rivals that of several European countries, including Greece, Portugal,and Belgium.

"We were interested in exploring the population history of European Romanibecause they constitute an important fraction of the European population, buttheir marginalized situation in many countries also seems to have affectedtheir visibility in scientific studies," said David Comas of the Institutde Biologia Evolutiva at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain.

The Romani people lack written historical records on their origins anddispersal. To fill in the gaps in the new study, Comas and Manfred Kayser from Erasmus UniversityRotterdam in the Netherlands,together with their international European colleagues, gathered genome-widedata from 13 Romani groups collected across Europeto confirm an Indian origin for European Romani, consistent with earlierlinguistic studies.

The genome-wide evidence specified the geographic origin toward thenorth or northwestern parts of India and provided a date of originof about 1,500 years ago. While the Middle East and Caucasusregions are known to have had an important influence on Romani language, theresearchers saw limited evidence for shared genetic ancestry between theEuropean Romani and those who live in those regions of the world today. Once inEurope, Romani people began settling in various locations, likely spreadingacross Europe via the Balkan region about 900years ago.

"From a genome-wide perspective, Romani people share a common and uniquehistory that consists of two elements: the roots in northwestern India and the admixture with non-RomaniEuropeans accumulating with different magnitudes during the out-of-Indiamigration across Europe," Kayser said."Our study clearly illustrates that understanding the Romani's geneticlegacy is necessary to complete the genetic characterization of Europeans as awhole, with implications for various fields, from human evolution to the healthsciences."