High in the Indian Himalayas, a remote lake lies in a snowfall strewn with hundreds of human skeletons.
Roopkund Lake is 5029 meters above sea level at the bottom of a steep slope on Trisul, one of the highest mountains in India, in the state of Uttarakhand.
The remains were scattered around and under the ice at the ‘lake of skeletons’, which was discovered in 1942 by a British forest ranger patrolling. Anthropologists and scientists have been studying the remains for more than half a century.
The lake has been attracting curious scientists and visitors for years. Depending on the season and the weather, the lake expands, remaining frozen for most of the year. Only when the snow melts are the skeletons visible, sometimes with flesh attached and well preserved. To date, the skeletal remains of about 600-800 people have been found here. In tourism promotions, the local government describes it as a ‘mystery lake’.
For more than half a century, anthropologists and scientists have studied the surplus and surprised them with a number of questions.
Who were these people? When did they die? How did they die? Where do they come from?
One ancient theory links the remains to an Indian king, his wife and their servants, who all perished in a blizzard about 870 years ago.
Another suggests that some of the remains of Indian soldiers are those who tried to invade Tibet in 1841 and were repulsed. More than 70 of them were then forced to find their way home across the Himalayas and died on the way.
Another assumes that it could have been a “cemetery” where the victims of an epidemic were buried. In villages in the area, there is a popular national anthem that tells how goddess Nanda Devi created a hailstorm ‘as hard as iron’ that killed people meandering along the lake. India’s second highest mountain, Nanda Devi, is revered as a goddess.
Earlier skeletal studies found that most people who died were tall – ‘more than average’. Most of them were middle-aged adults, between 35 and 40 years old. There were no babies or children. Some of them were elderly women. Everyone was in pretty good health.
It was also widely accepted that the skeletons consisted of a single group of people who died simultaneously in a single catastrophic incident during the 9th century.
The latest five-year study, which involved 28 co-authors from 16 institutions based in India, the US and Germany, found that all of these assumptions may not be true.
Scientists have genetically analyzed the remains of 38 bodies, including 15 women, which have been genetically analyzed – some of which date from about 1,200 years.
They found that the dead were both genetically diverse and that their deaths were separated by as much as 1000 years.
“This gives rise to any explanation relating to a single catastrophic event that led to their deaths,” Eadaoin Harney, lead author of the study and a doctoral student at Harvard University, told me. “It is still not clear what happened at Roopkund Lake, but we can now be sure that the deaths of these individuals could not be explained by a single event.”
But even more interestingly, the genetics study found that the dead are made up of different people: one group of people has genetics similar to contemporary people living in South Asia, while the other is ‘closely related’ to people living in present-day Europe, especially those living on the Greek island of Crete.
The people who come from South Asia “also do not seem to come from the same population”.
“Some of them have descent that would be more common in groups from the north of the subcontinent, while others have descent that would be more common in southern groups,” says Ms Harney.
So have these diverse groups of people traveled to the lake in smaller groups over a few hundred years? Did some of them die on a single occasion?
No weapons or ammunition or merchandise were found on the site – the lake is not located on a trade route. Genetic studies have found no evidence of the presence of an ancient bacterial pathogen that can provide disease as an explanation for the cause of death.
A pilgrimage passing by the lake may explain why people traveled in the area. Studies show that credible reports of the pilgrimage in the area only appeared in the late 19th century, but inscriptions in local temples date between the 8th and 10th centuries, indicating potential earlier origins.
Thus, scientists believe that some of the bodies found at the site occurred due to a ‘mass death during a pilgrimage’.
But how did people from the eastern Mediterranean end up at a remote lake in the highest mountains in India?
It seems unlikely that people from Europe would have traveled all the way from Roopkund to take part in a Hindu pilgrimage.
Or was it a genetically isolated population of people from the eastern Mediterranean who had lived in the region for generations before?
“We’re still looking for answers,” Ms Harney said.