evidence: Tajik National Park (Mountains of the Pamirs) was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2013: According to UNESCO: "Tajik National Park (2,611,674 hectares in area) encompasses almost the entire Pamir Mountains, the third highest mountain ecosystem in the world after the Himalaya and Karakorum Mountains. The Pamir Mountains lie at the center of the ‘Pamir Knot’, the term used by geographers to describe the tangle of the highest mountain ranges on the Eurasian continent. Huge tectonic forces stemming from the collision of the Indian-Australian plate with the Eurasian Plate have progressively thrown up the Himalaya, Karakoram, Hindu Kush, Kunlun and Tien Shan — all radiating out from the Pamir Mountains. Along with the Karakoram Mountains, the Pamir region is one of the most tectonically-active locations in the world. [Source: UNESCO] [...] Around 210,000 people live in the Gorno-Badakhshan region in Tajikistan. About 95 percent of them are Pamiri Tajiks (also known as Pamiris, or Pamirians, or Pamirian Tajiks). There are a few Tajiks, Kyrgyz and Russians. There are also some Pamiri Tajiks in Afghanistan, western China and Pakistan. The Gorno-Badakhshan region embraces most of the Pamirs. It accounts for 45 percent of Tajikistan’s territory but is home to only three percent of its people. The largely Shiite inhabitants of the Pamir mountains speak a number of mutually unintelligible eastern Iranian dialects quite distinct from the Tajik spoken in the rest of the country. [Source: Encyclopedia of World Cultures: China, Russia and Eurasia edited by Paul Friedrich and Norma Diamond (C.K. Hall & Company]