"I been around for a long, long year": Gypsies in Europe for 1,500 years

A STUDY done by 22 experts on genetics has stated that the ancestors of Europe's Romanies arrived in Europe around 1,500 years ago- which is much further back in time than previously thought.

Over the centuries it has been believed that Romani people- who've been known by dozens of others names, including Gypsies- either came from Egypt, or the Holy Land, or even from the surface of the moon.

In the 18th century, however, scholars who had looked at how the Romani language is connected to other Indian languages came to realise that the first Romani people came from what is now northern India. 

By looking at how Romani has changed over time, absorbing words from other European languages, scholars of recent decades steadily began to agree that it was about 1,000 years ago that the first Romani people had left the Indian subcontinent.

They then began their long journey through Asia, and into Europe and beyond. The new study, though, would seem to prove that Romani people have actually been in Europe for half a millennium longer than was thought.

"There were already some linguistic studies that gave clues pointing to India and genetic studies too, though without being precise about the where or when," said research group leader David Comas, as reported by the Guardian newspaper.

"Now we can see that they arrived in one single wave from the north-west of India around 1,500 years ago."

The new study examined evidence from 13 different groups of Romanies living across Europe. The groups lived in locations as far apart as Estonia and Portugal, which are separated by almost 2,700 miles.

Distinctive Romani genomes, called haplotypes, show that regardless of where Romanies may be living now, their ancestors arrived in the Balkans around 500 AD, not long after the fall of the Roman Empire in western Europe.

Romanies are Europe's largest ethnic minority group, with a population of perhaps 11 million in present-day Europe. In many places, however, they are still looked upon as a "foreign" people whose right to live here is questioned by right wing groups.

Evidence that Romanies have lived in Europe since ancient times would seem to flatly contradict such ideas.

The report, titled "Reconstructing the Population History of European Romani from Genome-wide Data", was published last month in the journal Current Biology.