The ancestral population of modern Asian people has its origins in the two primary prehistoric settlement centres – greater Southwest Asia and from the Mongolian plateau towards Northern China.

However, around 2,000 BCE early Iranian speaking people and Indo-Aryans arrived in Iran and northern Indian subcontinent.

Pressed by the Mongols, Turkic peoples often migrated to the western and northern regions of the Central Asian plains.

[38][39] Austroasiatic and Austronesian people establish in Southeast Asia between 5.000 and 2.000 BCE, partly merging with, but eventually displacing the indigenous Australo-Melanesians.

Some groups or countries in Asia are completely urban (e.g., Qatar and Singapore); the largest countries in Asia with regard to population are the China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Japan, Philippines, Vietnam, Iran, Turkey, Thailand, Burma, South Korea, Uzbekistan, and Malaysia.

Central Asia, in its most common definition, is deemed to consist of five former Soviet Socialist Republics: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.

Central Asia has a long, rich history mainly based on its geographical location along the ancient Silk Road.

It has been conquered by Mongols, Tibetans, Timurids, Uzbeks, Persians, Tatars, Russians, Afghans and Sarmatians, and thus has a very distinct, vibrant culture.

[65][66] Ancestral East Asians are, based on archaeogenetic data, suggested to have originated in Mainland Southeast Asia, and expanded outgoing from Southern China in multiple waves northwards and southwards respectively.

[82] The Chinese script was passed on first to Korea, Vietnam in the 1st century, then to Japan, where it forms a major component of the Japanese writing system.

In Korea, Sejong the Great invented the hangul alphabet in 1443, which later became the main orthographic system for the Korean language in the 19th century.

South Asia in general definition, consists of the countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

Finally the Northeast Indian states of Meghalaya, Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland, and tribal groups of Assam and Tripura have cultural affinities with Southeast Asia.

Dravidian languages are spoken in India,fewer parts of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Maldives, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.

Austroasiatic languages are spoken in certain northern and eastern areas of Bangladesh, parts of Nepal and scattered across different zones of India mostly concentrated around Chota Nagpur Plateau and the state of Meghalaya.

West Asia consists of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Cyprus, Georgia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, most of Turkey, and part of Egypt.

Many of the West Asian countries contain expansive deserts, and thus many nomadic groups exist today, most notably the Bedouin Arabs.