The Kalash of Pakistan consider themselves to be descendants of Alexander the Great, but genetic research does not seem to confirm this claim.
The Kalash are a religious minority with exotic features. They are an isolated tribe, which consists of about 4,000 members and survives among Islamic peoples. They speak an Indo-European language and have lived for many centuries in the Indochina Mountains of northwestern Pakistan, near the border of Afghanistan.
According to the site factchecker.gr, many Greek media present the Kalash as descendants of veteran soldiers of Alexander the Great’s army, who had settled in the area.
But the science of genetics has a different view.
The Kalash seem to be a pre-Islamic Indo-Aryan people of South Asia, who have nothing to do with the Greeks. More specifically:
In 2007, a genetic analysis of Y-chromosome in 44 individuals found Haplogroups L3a (22.7%), H1 * (20.5%), R1a (18.2%), G (18.2%), J2 (9.1%), R * (6.8%), R1 * (2.3%), and L * (2.3%), and not I-M170 and E-M78, which are common among the Greeks. A similar research of 2006 found that the relatively typical for the Greeks Haplogroup E3b is not found in the Kalash.
A 2014 study estimated that between 900 and 210 BC a genetic admixture of the Kalash with western Eurasians had occurred and had linked this to the invasion of Alexander the Great in that area in 327-326 BC.
However, researchers from Britain, Italy and Pakistan, led by Qasim Ayub of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute of Genetics in Cambridge, analyzed DNA samples from 23 Kalash people, who lived in three different valleys. The study - which in 2015 was published in the “American Journal of Human Genetics”- argues that the Kalash have been practically living isolated for many thousands of years, after being cut off from a common ancestor in Eurasia.
The geneticist Razib Khan writes in “Discover”: The hypothesis of the origin of the Kalash is based on their exotic appearance (blond hair, blue eyes, etc.), and their religion, which looks like Indo-European, is similar to (polytheistic) Vedic Hinduism, with little Islamic influence. According to the data from the European and South Asian populations, the Kalash are descendants of the latter, and specifically shifted towards the Iranian people (Indo-Europeans).
His final conclusion is that the soldiers of Alexander the Great had not left genetic traces in the area.
The language of the Kalash belongs to the Indo-Aryan language family, and it is not related to the Greek language, but to these of India and Pakistan. Similarly, their religion -although polytheistic- is related to the also polytheistic Vedic Hinduism (c. 1500 - c. 500 BC), the ancestor of modern Hinduism) and not to the polytheistic worship of the Ancient Greeks.
Although Alexander the Great staffed the cities he had founded with veteran soldiers, in the case of the Kalash, there is insufficient evidence to suggest a genetic similarity of this tribe to the Ancient Greeks. Although several oral traditions state that the Kalash are descendants of the soldiers of Alexander the Great, the evidence of genetic research refutes this claim.
