Linguistic history as well as a few limited genetic studies had already suggested the Romani originally hailed from India. To confirm this idea and uncover more details on the migration, Comas and his colleagues used a technique that compares DNA segments from across the whole genome with that of other populations. They used DNA samples from 13 groups of Romani spread across Europe.
"In our study, we do not focus on specific regions of the genome, but on the genome as a whole, which provides us the complete genetic information of the populations under study," he told LiveScience.
The results revealed the modern Romani's ancestors migrated out of northwest India all at one time 1,500 years ago, Comas and his colleagues reported Thursday in the journal Current Biology. Once they arrived in Europe, they spread across the continent from the Balkan region about 900 years ago, Comas said.
Over hundreds of years of history, intermarriage between Romani people and local populations has waxed and waned, Comas said. They have often been discriminated against; during the Holocaust, somewhere between 200,000 and 1.5 million Romani were killed by Hitler's Nazis. After World War II, Romani in communist nations were often targeted for "assimilation," which sometimes meant forced sterilization to lower their birth rate.