As for the Himalayan momo, the dish is believed to have spread to Nepal along with the influx of the Tibetan diaspora. Since this dish was initially popular among the Newar community of the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal, one prevalent belief is that traveling Nepali Newar merchants took the recipe of momo from Tibet where the Nepali Newar Merchants used to go to trade and brought it back home to Nepal. In Tibet, the filling of the dish was typically meat, such as yak, due to the scarcity of vegetables in Tibet. However in Nepal, the momo includes vegetarian variation in the modern era to feed the large population of vegetarians. Unproven, but substantiated by the dates and references to momo in colloquial references, the civil war in Nepal pushed out the Nepali diaspora to seek a livelihood in the Indian sub-continent, which further proliferated to the prevalence of Himalayan style momo in the southern half of the Indian sub-continent.