Derkx, InezCeballos, FranciscoBiagini, Simone Andrea, 1983-Subedi, SudarshanRajbhandari, PrajwalGyawali, AnitaBosch Fusté, ElenaVinicius, LucioMigliano, Andrea Bamberg2025-02-242025-02-242025Derkx I, Ceballos F, Biagini SA, Subedi S, Rajbhandari P, Gyawali A, et al. The genetic demographic history of the last hunter-gatherer population of the Himalayas. Sci Rep. 2025 Jan 9;15(1):1505. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-80156-02045-2322http://hdl.handle.net/10230/69683Nepal, largely covered by the Himalayan mountains, hosts indigenous populations with distinct linguistic, cultural, and genetic characteristics. Among these populations, the Raute, Nepal's last nomadic hunter-gatherers, offer a unique insight into the genetic and demographic history of Himalayan foragers. Despite strong cultural connections to other regional foragers, the genetic history of this population remains understudied. This study presents newly genotyped genome-wide SNP data of the Raute to explore their genetic isolation, their origins and potential as an older foraging lineage, and their genetic connections to other regional foragers. Our results show that high levels of inbreeding in the Raute indicate recent genetic isolation. Effective population size estimates suggest a dramatic population decline around 50 generations ago. Strong genetic similarity to Nepalese populations of various subsistence styles highlights a dynamic history of genetic interactions prior to isolation, with particular closeness to historical foragers like the Kusunda and Tharu, but excludes an ancient foraging lineage origin. The study underscores the complexity of human population dynamics in the Himalayas, suggesting a history of extensive interaction between foragers and farmers, followed by isolation and demographic decline among the Raute.application/pdfeng© The Author(s) 2024. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-80156-0Hunter-gatherersNepalPopulation geneticsRauteRuns of homozygosityinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess