And because of their remote location, many of them still follow non-Muslim cults and spiritualities such as those derived from ancient Indo-European paganism. There are also few there who practice Shamanism.
Other spiritualities have died out or have been embedded into Islam such as Sufism.
Physical appearance evidence:
Because of their fair features and some of them retaining non-Muslim practices, many myths of their alleged "Greek" and "Macedonian" ancestry have arisen.
This myth may have started out as far back as the British Raj, but forgotten and later revived perhaps as recently as the mid 90s by missionaries from Greece and Macedonia.
Many recent documentaries and articles are made by Greek and Macedonian missionaries who go and pressure the Kalash and Hunza to accept descent from Alexander and his army.
They also offer financial aid in return for accepting the theories of their alleged Greek/Macedonian origins.
At other times, they manipulate these populations (sometimes even the Pakhtuns) into believing they are of Alexander's army. Part of this is due to the struggle between Greece and the modern country of "Macedonia" (better known as republic of Macedonia) to claim Alexander The Great as one of them.
And as already mentioned, because the Kalash and Hunza have certain traits mostly different from the rest of modern Pakistan, these have been used as a claim to declare them as "Greeks" or "Macedonians."
White features (light skin, hair, eyes etc.) are not a trait uncommon in Pakistan.
There are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people from Pakistan with white skin (including those in my family) and features similar to Mediterranean peoples and some to central and Northern Europeans.
What is now uncommon, especially in modern times is Nordic features in Pakistan.
On the subject of of skin and hair colors, it should be noted that most Greek people have much darker hair and sometimes darker skin than the Kalash and Hunza.
In fact, many people from central and western Pakistan can be better compared in hair, eye and skin color to Greeks.
Here is a random picture of Greek people dancing:
Now compare them to Northern Pakistanis, mainly unmixed Kalash and Hunza pictures below. (click on images to enlarge)
White Northern Pakistani girl of unknown ethnicity:
Kalash:
Though many or most Kalash may look Mediterranean (unlike the pictures above), the reason behind that might be absorbing genes from other darker-skinned populations in the regions.
Percentage wise I would say the more pure unmixed Kalash have lighter skin and hair than modern Greeks.
I would say the same in the case of the Hunza. Take another example of this Greek man and compare him to some fairer Hunza:
Hunza:
Evidence of religion/spirituality:
Moving on to the religious past, most Pakistanis are blind to the history and practices of their ancient ancestors; hence they are often prone to Hindutva propaganda, which speaks of a "religion" called "Hinduism" being practiced in Pakistan (see meanings and origins of Hinduism) prior to Islam.
The blindness of Pakistanis to the history of their ancient ancestors is amplified by Wahhabi Islamists who teach them that their ancestors were victims of a caste system and practiced barbaric traditions. At other times they are taught that their ancestors were Arabs, Turks and Persian.
Actually the reality is far from the teachings of the Islamists.
The people of Pakistan, being primarily of Indo-European (IE) descent had ancestors who practiced various related IE cults and religions.
The same is the case for modern Europeans who have common ancestry with the people of Pakistan, especially Northern Pakistanis, who live in remote, mountainous locations and have absorbed much less non-Indo-European genes due to their isolation.
These common ancestors of Pakistanis and Europeans were called the Proto-Indo-Europeans.
A fact to note is that not all people who speak an IE language are descended from the Proto-Indo-Europeans.
The early IE people lived sometime around the fifth or sixth millennium BC. They had many pagan gods and symbols in their paganist cults/religions. To understand them better, readers should research ancient Indo-European culture, spirituality and mythology.
Some good resources for these are Internet sites such as this or books such as Encyclopedia of Indo-European culture.
After centuries of IE migration and the rise of major world religions such as Buddhism, Christianity, Islam etc, the various related spiritualities of the IE people began to die out to these major world religions.
However, traces of these spiritualities and mythologies can still be found in various IE ethnic groups, which can be very similar to each other, establishing another common connection between IE peoples besides language.
Take for example the Greek sun pictured below:
Now compare it to the sun on the flag used by the Kurdish people:
As readers can see, these symbols are used by two peoples, Greeks and Kurds, both speaking IE languages.
The strong resemblance is not a coincidence as the two suns have a common source in IE mythology and culture.
In the case of the Kalash, their IE religion did not die out to Islam or any other due to their extremely remote location.
Anthropological and historical material claims their religion/cult to be a direct off-shoot of the original IE religion(s).
Because most of the people of Pakistan no longer practice IE culture or spirituality, some Greeks and Macedonians have tried to claim the Kalash peoples as their own.
Their methods seem to be by pointing to the common IE culture and spirituality of the Kalash to Greece and Macedonia's pre-Christian IE cultural and spiritual traits.
By this reasoning, the Greeks and Macedonians can also claim other IE practices and cultural traits to be from Alexander's armies.
Take for example Celtic culture or Zoroastrian culture.
Look at the sun in this Zoroastrian depiction below:
Does it not look similar to the Greek sun pictured further up in this post? Can Greeks and Macedonians now claim the Zoroastrian peoples in the region to be Alexander's descendants?
Or even the Kurds. Can the Kurds be claimed to be Alexander's descendants based on the common sun symbol between the Greeks/Macedonians and them?
The point I'm trying to make is that the culture and religion of the Kalash does not resemble pre-Christian Greek or Macedonian culture because the Kalash are an "off-shoot" of Alexander's army, but due to a common origin between the cultures of pre-Christian/Muslim/Buddhist etc. cultures and religions of IE peoples- including the pre-Islamic ancestors of most Pakistanis.
Linguistic evidence:
Greek and Macedonian are both IE languages. Greek is an isolated language in the IE family belonging to the Centum sect, while Macedonian is a Slavic language belonging to the Satem sect.
The language of the Kalash on the other hand belongs to the Dardic branch of IE. Linguists sometimes place Dardic as part of Indo-Aryan, but a distinct form of Indo-Aryan or "Northern Indo-Aryan."
To claim the Kalash as one of theirs, Greeks and Macedonians would have to explain how a Greek/Slavic speaking people, switched to Dardic. Some would possibly argue it is due to being surrounded by Dardic speaking populations.
Though I might be wrong, sources I've come across have indicated that language shift usually leaves traces of the previous language of an ethnic group in the new language that they have adopted.
Outside of a common Proto-Indo-European (PIE) source, can any traces of Slavic or Greek words be found in Kalashamondr? If so is it possible other Dardic languages such as Kashmiri or any other carry this?
Also on the subject of linguistics, why are the languages of the Chitral Valley (home of the Kalash) not written in Greek script or any script for that matter?
Their isolated position has protected their culture and spirituality, so surely their alleged "Greek" script could have been protected as well.
Even if not used in regular communication, why can't any Greek writing be found on their cultural items or tools used in regular life?
Genetic evidence:
According to sources, Haplogroup J2 is found primarily amongst Mediterranean populations, regardless of the linguistic diversity in that region.
Also according to this source, (don't know how reliable) certain subclades of Haplogroup J2 coincide with historic records of Greek colonization worldwide.
This makes sense. Since Pakistanis are predominantly members of Haplogroup R1, a subclade of Haplogroup R.
The only significant J2 markers found in Pakistan are in Pakhtunkhwa/NWFP, Punjab and parts of Sindh. This directly coincides with Greek colonization of Pakistan.
Even a Bangladeshi gentlemen who is an associate of mine is part Pakhtun. I've come across many Bangladeshis who are part Pakhtun including one person in my paternal family who has Pakhtun and Bengali roots from his mother's side.
That being mentioned, this associate of mine claims to have Greek ancestry from his Pakhtun side of the family- again coinciding with sources of Greek genetic influence in the Pakhtun population.
Had the Kalash or other Northern Pakistanis been of Greek descent, more significant markers of Haplogroup J2 would have been found in Northern Pakistan instead of being limited to mostly Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab.
Other evidence:
According to this site, Alexander the Great himself described light-skinned people in the Chitral Valley.
In the linked site, there is also a claim that Alexander encountered wooden boxes used by these peoples as coffins, which Alexander and his army used to burn wood.
This statement is also found in the book Empires of the Indus by Alice Albinia.
It states under a picture of these coffins that Alexander and his men found them and burned them for fire. This is possibly due to the fact that Northern Pakistan has cold climates even during the summer (I myself have been there in the summer and experienced the cold nights) because of the high altitude.
The Kalash are known to place their dead in wooden coffins which are then placed in the mountains.
This fact is also mentioned in Alice Albinia's book.
Alexander finding these wooden coffins and making a clear mention of white people in the Chitral Valley is more clear evidence of the Kalash and other Dardic peoples already being in this region much before his arrival. Historians and anthropologists estimate the first Aryan invasions in the subcontinent happened around 1700 to 1500 BC, well over a thousand years before Alexander's invasion which occurred in the third century BC.
Concealing their dead in wooden coffins might be a tradition the Kalash also inherited from Proto-Indo-European/"Kurgan culture" though I can't be certain until I further research this tradition.
Additional evidence going against the "Alexander's descendants" theory are the lack of Greek/Macedonian artifacts found in the culture of the Kalash. Take for example this coin pictured below followed by a head bust. Both were supposedly used during the Gandharran Civilization following Alexander's conquest:
No known inscriptions of Greek heroes on their pottery or Greek gods in their places of worship.
Readers reading this post will have noticed that I have not made much mention of the Hunza.
The reason is because there is even little the Greeks or Macedonians can provide for their supposed "connection" to the Hunza especially on linguistic grounds.
The language of the Hunza, Burushaski is a language isolate and bears no known genetic relationship to any other language on Earth.
In fact most of Pakistan's languages which are Indo-European have much more in common with Greek and Macedonian than Burushaski does.
Even DNA tests carried out in 2008 show no link between the Hunza and the Macedonians. The origins of the Hunza are shrouded in mystery and no written records of their language exist. Some Tibetan sources mention this language, but written in local Tibetan languages.
The proposed Na-Dene Caucasian family had included the Burushaski language as one of it's members. But according to some websites, further research excludes this language from the proposed family.
Most Greek and Macedonian claims over these people would not be taken seriously, especially based on the facts I have posted above. And even if they were taken seriously, questions would then later arise on the validity of these claims.
Some last notes:
I would like to apologize to any Greeks and Macedonians reading this post. I understand that not all people from Greece and Macedonia claim Northern Pakistani populations as Alexander's descendants.
It's also a noticeable fact that many peoples in Pakistan and third world countries like to claim ancestries which has little or nothing to do with them.
Such as Pakistanis claiming Arab or Mughal ancestry with little evidence on the basis of feeling 'more Muslim.'
Other people do it sometimes because they are manipulated to do so such as some Kashmiris, Pakhtuns and Balochis claiming Jewish or other Semitic ancestries, which shall be discussed in another post.
There are even others sometimes paid to speak in favor of accepting a foreign nation's claim over their ethnicity.
Knowing the poverty in Pakistan, it should hardly be surprising that some individuals would accept bribes into accepting these claims.
The best way to counter such claims is with counter claims backed by evidence and facts. The truth and knowledge are the most powerful tools in winning arguments. Always.
