Abstract
Three coalescent-based methods allowed us to infer some aspects of the history of three Bulgarian Gypsies populations belonging to the Vlax linguistic group: the Lom, Rudari and Kalderas. We used several kinds of genetic markers: HV1 sequences of the maternally inherited mitochondrial genome and microsatellites of the paternally inherited Y chromosome and of the biparentally inherited chromosome 8. This allowed us to infer several parameters for men and women: the splitting order of the populations and the ages of the splitting events, the growth rate in each population and the migration rates between populations. Altogether, they enabled us to infer a demographic scenario that could explain the genetic diversity of Vlax Roma: recent splits occurring after the arrival in Europe, asymmetric migration flows especially for males and unequal growth rates. This represents a considerable contribution to the Vlax Roma history in comparison with the inferences from classical population genetics.
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Acknowledgements
We thank MK Kuhner, P Beerli, IJ Wilson and L Excoffier for their help in the usage of their programs. We thank also Drs A Sibert and B Toupance for helpful comments. This study was funded by the Australian Research Council and The Wellcome Trust. Some runs of the coalescence softwares were performed on the UNIX machine of INRA.
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Chaix, R., Austerlitz, F., Morar, B. et al. Vlax Roma history: what do coalescent-based methods tell us?. Eur J Hum Genet 12, 285–292 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.ejhg.5201126
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.ejhg.5201126
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