Kathmandu. The Sherpa, especially those living in Rolwaling Valley – a remote Nepalese valley on the southern side of the Himalayas – are the ideal candidates to unveil how man has been able to adapt to hypobaric hypoxia, the reduction of oxygen at high altitudes. A study from the University of Bologna was recently published in Scientific Reports, a Nature group journal, which sheds light on their origin and the characteristic that all all Tibetan-Burmese peoples hold. The biological samples analysed were collected during a series of scientific-humanitarian expeditions coordinated by Davide Peluzzi and Giorgio Marinelli, founders of the non-profit association “Explora Nuunat International”, with the help of the Sherpas of the Mount Everest Summitter’s Club. The study – conducted at the Molecular Anthropology Laboratory of the Department of Biological Geological and Environmental Sciences of the University of Bologna – analysed the genetic heritage of Eastern Asian populations that inhabit the middle and high Himalayan Nepalese valleys with the aim to reconstruct its biological and demographic history. “We are talking about a very heterogeneous group of people who migrated to Burma, Bhutan, India, and Nepal from China, and spread along the whole southern slope of the highest mountain range in the world”, explains University of Bologna researcher and coordinator of the study, Marco Sazzini. They are people who are linguistically identified as Tibetan-Burmese that prior to this research, we did not know much about. “It is thought that they originated from an ancient population that migrated south from western China, during the Neolithic period. There is some archaeological and linguistic evidence that supports this theory, but their biological ancestry has not yet been clarified to date” continues Sazzini. (9Colonne)
