Are Dalits ancestors of modern Roma?
By Express News Service - HYDERABAD
30th November 2012 09:09 AM
The city-based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) claims to have traced the origin of Roma (Gypsy) population.
Though linguistic and genetic studies on European Roma traced them to Eurasia, there was ambiguity over the exact parental population group.
In the absence of archaeological evidence and scanty documentation of Roma, an international team of scientists led by Kumarasamy Thangaraj of CCMB traced the founder of European Roma by using the Y- chromosome genetic signatures.
According to a CCMB press release, the Y- chromosome is inherited: father to son to grandson. All the males in a family, evolved from a single male founder, will possess the same Y-chromosome.
In this study, scientists screened 10,000 males from around the world, including 7,000 belonging to 205 ethnic groups in India, to discern a more precise ancestral source of European Romani (Gypsy) population.
“We have compared the worldwide phylogeographical data, for Indian H1a1a haplotypes with Roma and concluded that the aboriginal scheduled tribes and scheduled caste populations of northwestern India, also known as ‘Dalits’, are the most likely ancestral populations of modern European Roma”, Thangaraj said.
“The finding corroborates the hypothesised cognacy of the terms _ Roma and Doma _ and resolves the controversy about the Gangetic plain and the Punjab in favour of the northwestern portion of the diffuse widespread range of the Doma ancestral population of northern India”, George van Driem, a linguist from the University of Bern, Switzerland, said.
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Comments(6)
For the last thousand or so years,Islamic raiders have been capturing ,millions and thousands of Indian Hindu Men and Women and exporting the. It is with deep shame I say to day in Pakistan millons of Hari ( Hindus) are illeghally kept as captive slaves.. When these slaves got oppertunity they escaped into other parts of the world including Europe. Nazis slaughtered 500.000 Roma( indians ). This how roma came to europe.
Posted by Amina at 12/01/2012 02:25 Reply to this Report abuse
This theory Debunks claims made by Supiramanian Swamy that all Indians are the same and have the same DNA.
Posted by Truth at 12/01/2012 03:20 Reply to this Report abuse
this paper is all about roma and their link to india, doesn;t make any sense to link it with the subhramanian swamy. However, his statement is true in the light of evidence that all the Indians largely have a common paleolithic ancestor proposed first by DNA study in Kivisild et al. 2003
Posted by cj at 12/03/2012 18:08 Reply to this Report abuse
Dalit is a very recent term using instead of harijan. it is from sanskrit word "dal". Roma is very ancient name, even mentioned in quraan1433years ago
Posted by MJ at 12/02/2012 08:38 Reply to this Report abuse
Hello! I am myself a rom and belong to one of the tribes called Lowara. We have many castes and many tribal groups (nacjji) within the Romani nation. I have hard time understanding the so called "new" discovery. I believe quite alot of Roma people came from old tribes of India but not all of the Roma and I don't believe all the roma in the world came from just one founding population or a caste called domba. It is impossible! Among us there are many different castes and tribes and still is today. And we still have a cast system of our own although not so rigoruous as in India in some parts. But we have High Caste Roma and Low Caste Roma. They have compared 7000 people in India and 3000 people in the rest of the world. How many of them were Rom/Gypsies and from which parts of the world?
Posted by Yani at 12/04/2012 09:44 Reply to this Report abuse
Hi I am also of a Romani family and I find it very hard to believe your so called "new" discovery as something relating us to a certain group in India called "Dalit". With regards to the name "Rom" & "Roman" then if this article was research with respect then you would know that Rom means 'husband' in our language and is therefore from the Sanskrit word "Raman" and has nothing to do with Domba. This article shows us Europeans how sad and ignorant some Indians can be towards a people who have a common ancestry. How sad to be witness to
Posted by Tsigano at 12/22/2012 06:09 Reply to this Report abuse