An anthropologist finds a "living stone-age museum "
On a chilly September night in 1982, three men approached a police checkpoint at the village of Lotsum, along the tense cease-fire line between India and Pakistan in the Himalayas. The travelers looked like ordinary Kashmiri peasants, and the guards let them pass. But one of them was not what he seemed. French Anthropologist Michel Peissel had disguised himself in garb like that of his two local guides, staining his face with walnut dye in order to enter a region long forbidden to foreigners: the Dansar Plain of "Little Tibet," the no man's land of a legendary tribe known as the Minaro.
Unlike their neighbors in the mountains of Kashmir, the Minaro have curiously light complexions and sharp, high-cheeked faces almost European in character. The entire tribe consists of only about 800 people, but these hardy, isolated mountain folk may have a cultural significance far out of proportion to their small numbers.
Some scholars have speculated that they may be survivors of the Dards, an obscure tribe mentioned in ancient Greek chronicles. Others suspect that they are descendants of troops left behind by Alexander the Great on his invasion of India. The most intriguing theory is that their ancestors were the original Aryans, the prehistoric Indo-European people whose language and light skin linger on in the speech and appearance of modern Europeans. Fascinated by this possibility, Adolf Hitler in 1938 reportedly dispatched one of the Third Reich's racial experts on a personal survey of the Minaro region. It is said that Hitler even considered sending a number of blond German women to have children by these "pure" Aryans.
Peissel, 47, a onetime Harvard Business School student who turned to anthropology after a summer's roaming of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, is convinced that the Minaro are Aryans, but his reports hardly evoke the image of an Asian master race. In a book just published in Paris called L'Or des Fourmis (The Ants' Gold), Peissel argues that the Minaro constitute "a living museum of life in the days of stone-age men." They live in adobe huts, erect great druidic stone monuments and center their livelihoods on the ibex, a wild mountain goat that they hunt with arrows tipped with the poison wolfsbane (rock carvings of the ibex are scattered throughout their mountains). The Minaro also raise sheep and goats, grow grapes, from which they make wine, and in spite of an arid climate, plant a little grain.
Though white-bearded elders preside symbolically over village ceremonies, says Peissel, who spent six months studying them, the Minaro are a matriarchal society. Most married women have more than one husband. The women dominate the men and slap them around in public. The principal deities are female, goddesses of fortune and fertility, who preside over lesser goddesses that reign over time, the hunt and the village.