It is hardly a secret that the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, has rapidly gained in stature since receiving political asylum in India, where he heads a government-in-exile. But new evidence suggests that today even ordinary Tibetans who followed in his footsteps are walking tall - literally.
Anthropologists at the prestigious Calcutta-based Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) have established that Tibetans born and brought up on Indian soil are taller than their highland counterparts.
Their findings, published in the American Journal of Human Biology, reveal that Tibetan men and women between the ages of 18 and 40 who were raised at low altitudes in India are on average about 4cm to 5cm taller than their counterparts in the Tibet Autonomous Region.
Estimates of Tibetans now living in 35 settlements across India vary between 130,000 and 200,000. Initially, about 80,000 Tibetans followed the Dalai Lama when he escaped to India in 1959 following China's annexation of the region. Since then, a steady trickle of refugees has braved some of the world's highest mountains to enter India through Nepal. They inevitably flock to Dharamsala in northern India where the Dalai Lama's Central Tibetan Administration, or government-in-exile, is headquartered. Another 10 Tibetan settlements exist in Nepal and seven in Bhutan.
The ground-breaking research was conducted by Ranjan Gupta, head of the ISI's biological anthropology section, and another scholar, Vikal Tripathy, who probed how Tibetans - the world's oldest high-altitude population - were adapting to the low-altitude environment in India.
Charles Weitz, chairman of anthropology at Philadelphia's Temple University, describes the findings as 'very, very significant'. 'It's the first time anyone has systematically looked at Tibetans at different altitudes,' says Mr Weitz, who is an authority on adaptation to high-altitude environments, having studied populations in South America and China.