Origin and Identity of us::
Anthropologists agree that Bangladesh has historically been a land of many races. Long before the arrival of the Aryans in the 5th and 6th centuries B.C., the Bangalees were already racially mixed. It is said that the origin of human beings is Africa, but that some of them at first moved into the northern part of the Middle East and then dispersed across the world. The groups of the people who went to South-East Asia had crossed the land of Bangladesh more than fifty thousand years ago. These people developed languages, known as Austric Languages with their name Austric or Austro-Asiatic people. These people entered Bangladesh several thousand years ago from South-East Asia. Near about the same time or later some other people, whom we now classify as Mongoloid also entered the territories of Bangladesh from the East and spread mainly into the uplands and hilly areas.
Bangladesh is a melting-pot of ancient peoples. Different races and immigrants gradually added to the earlier stocks. The main peopling of this land was by those who came from the Southern and western parts of South-Asia and they are known as Dravidians. They were a physically diverse people speaking different languages, known as Dravidian family of languages. It is to be noted that the Dravidian language speakers were a mostly a Caucasoid people, which means in hair form and other physical features they resemble the people of the Middle-East more than they resemble the people of East-Asia. However they are generally darker than the different peoples to the East and West of South-Asia.
The latest arrivals were a people well known as the Aryans. They spoke a language of the Indo-European family of languages and they are said to have originated from the Northern parts of the Middle East and the Eastern parts of Europe. Over the centuries they mixed with the Dravidians and moved into the Bengal Basin sometimes after 600 B. C. They in turn mixed with the Austric and Mongoloid peoples already in Bangladesh and produced the physical types which are so common nowadays. Later other immigrants-Arabs, Turks and Pathans also came to this land. These people too added their physical stock to the melting-pot, so that today we have in Bangladesh a great variety of physical features. The Bengali ancestry, therefore, includes the Austric-speakers the Mongoloids, the Dravidians, the Aryans, the Arabs and the Turks and Pathans. Within the polity of Bangladesh there are also some groups of people, known as tribal people, who retain their distinct cultural entities and have not merged into the mainstream of Bangla- Speaking group.
