Tibetan ǀ South Asian
King Jigme Khesar NamgyelWangchuck. Wikimedia Commons.
The Kingdom of Bhutan, is a landlocked state in South Asia, located at the eastern end of the Himalayas and bordered to the south, east and west by the Republic of India and to the north by the People’s Republic of China. Bhutanese people primarily consist of the Ngalops and Sharchops, called the Western Bhutanese and Eastern Bhutanese respectively. The independence of Bhutan has endured for centuries and it has never been colonized. Headed by a spiritual leader known as the Zhabdrung Rinpoche, the territory was composed of many fiefdoms and governed as a Buddhist theocracy.
Bhutanese represents 936 individuals from the Royal Kingdom of Bhutan (across 17 different language groups) who were sampled in 2006 by Leiden University Medical Center in Leiden, The Netherlands.
Source publication: Allele frequency distribution for 21 autosomal STR loci in Bhutan, FSI, 2007, p68-72.