Talk:Tharu people
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[edit] Tharu resistance to malaria suggests long residence in Terai
Tharus were the main inhabitants of inner-terai valleys such as Chitwan, Dang and Deukhuri before malaria was suppressed via DDT and other ethnic groups finally arrived in force. Although Tharus have myths of coming from somewhere else, if their resistance to malaria is genetic, that suggests they must have lived in malarial land -- such as the Terai -- longer than ethnic groups that could hardly live there before DDT came into wide use locally.
How many thousand years does it take a human population to genetically evolve to fit a particular niche? Possibly this could be modeled using frequencies of sickle cell and other malaria-resisting genes in populations that did not evolve with malaria, making assumptions about natural selection in the event that these populations moved to the Terai.
Tharus do not seem to have indo-european features, yet speak a indo-european dialect. Did their aboriginal language progressively borrow from Hindi, Bhojpuri and Maithili until it ultimately shrunk to nothing?
Are Tharus racially Dravidian? They really don't look like South Indians to any great extent. Perhaps it would be more fruitful to look for affinities with indigenous peoples in Bengal, Northeastern India and on into northern Burma, Thailand and Vietnam.
[edit] Putting info from article here for now as it is unsourced
According to Nepal’s 2001 census, there are 1,533,879 ethnic Tharu (6.75% of Nepal's total population) of which 1,331,546 speak one of the seven Tharu dialects as a mother tongue. Thus, 97.63% of the ethnic Tharu are Hindu according to the 2001 Census of Nepal, whereas 1.95% are Buddhist. Mattisse(talk) 18:34, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Hindu expert needs to look at religion section
This article has a section on religion. There are external links at the bottom of the article but I am not qualified to correctly source that section. Hopefully someone more qualified than I will do it. Thanks! Sincerely, Mattisse(talk) 01:27, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
