What Is Pakistan's Religious Minority?
Pakistan, a country perceived as distinctly Muslim, is also home to a mysterious tribe with its own religion. So who are the Kalash people?
Sep 17, 2016 07:00 AM ET
posted by Jules Suzdaltsev
Pakistan is home to nearly 200 million, the sixth largest nation by population in the world. Counted among the 200 million are an ethnic minority group of just 4,000 people, known as the Kalash.
The Kalash are light-skinned minority group of about 4,000 people who inhabit a lush 1,000-square-mile valley in an isolated region of northeast Pakistan.
How exactly did this indigenous group find its way into Pakistan? Although no historian can say for certain, the current consensus among scholars as well as local lore among the indigenous population is that the Kalash descended from Alexander the Great and his Macedonian forces, whose campaign of conquest engulfed much of East Asia around 300 B.C.
In 2014, an international team of researchers collected DNA samples from 1,490 people belonging to genetically distinct populations. What the researchers found, and published in the journal Science, in Kalash DNA was traces of European and Middle Eastern ancestry, bolstering the case that the Kalash are descendents of Alexander the Great and his army.
http://www.seeker.com/what-is-pakistans-religious-minority-2008171495.html
3:06 video at link.
