Tibetan ǀ South Asian
Photo: Bidhya Devi Bhandari, president of Nepal since 2015
Nepal is one of three mountain kingdoms in the Himalayas. The Nepalese are descendants of three major migrations from India, Tibet, and North Burma and the Chinese province of Yunnan via Assam. Even though Indo-Nepalese migrants were latecomers to Nepal relative to the migrants from the north, they have come to dominate the country not only numerically, but also socially, politically, and economically. Neolithic tools found in the region indicate that it has been occupied for at least 11,000 years. The Himalayan mountain range, running from Pakistan in the west to north-eastern India
(Assam) in the east, is not only the highest land barrier on the face of this planet, it also forms a barrier between two distinct language families; Tibeto-Burman, which is predominantly
spoken north-east of the Himalayas, and Indo-European, which is spoken south of the Himalayas
Nepalese represents 953 unrelated individuals from Nepal across all major castes, religions, and languages who were sampled in 2005 by Leiden University Medical Center in The Netherlands and Tribhuvan University, Nepal.
Source publication: Allele frequency distribution for 21 autosomal STR loci in Nepal, FSI, 2007 p227-231.
[Population 334]
