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Unlike Hindus, the Minaro abhor cows and will not even touch them. Eating utensils are shunned if they have been used by such "impure" people as pregnant women, mothers who have recently given birth, menstruating women, and couples who have just had sexual relations. Occasionally the Minaro cleanse themselves with the smoke of burning juniper trees, but they almost never wash with water. Their Tibetan neighbors scorn them as "the dirtiest people in the world."
Peissel, who speaks Tibetan and has made frequent trips to the Himalayas, says: "The Minaro are indeed the last inheritors in Asia of Aryan, pre-Aryan and neolithic traditions." Beyond the physical and cultural clues, he cites evidence in the Minaro language, an archaic Indo-Aryan dialect called Shina, which contains a number of words that resemble those of modern European languages. Door, for example, is darr, hand is hath, time is tern, and knife (couteau in French) is cutter. Peissel believes that the Minaro managed to survive because their isolation and fierce independence enabled them to withstand the waves of Mongolian invasions that eventually engulfed the rest of Tibet.
Peissel admits that his ideas should be tested by further studies, though time may be running out. The Indian government is cutting roads into the region that will soon end its isolation. Says Peissel: "Like any tiny ethnic and cultural minority, the Minaro are doomed to disappear."
There is one ancient puzzle Peissel thinks he has solved for all time. It is a legend, first mentioned by the Greek historian Herodotus in 450 B.C., that in northern India there was a species of gigantic ant ("bigger than a fox, though not so big as a dog") that burrowed in gold-rich soil. Peissel asked the Minaro tribesmen about the story, only to be told that their ancestors did collect gold-bearing sand from the burrows of a local marmot, known scientifically as Marmota himalayanus. Peissel feels that the legend of the ants may have arisen because of etymological confusion between marmot and the Greek word for ant (murmêx). In any event, says the irrepressible anthropologist, "I leave to others the task of collecting the gold." —By Frederic Golden. Reported by Thomas A. Sancton/Paris