The mystery of "Skeleton Lake" which accumulates human remains from over a thousand years ago

On the Indian side of the Himalayas, at over 5,000 meters altitude, You will find one of the most mysterious places in the world. The Roopkund Lagoon is 40 meters in diameter and, in the few weeks of the year during which it is not frozen, it reveals the bones of hundreds of humans to which she owes her nickname: "The lake of the skeletons". Despite the interest aroused over the years by mountaineers, until the beginning of this century, no attempt was made to scientifically study the origin of these remains.

A first badysis felt that this death occurred in a single cataclysm and found reminiscences of this event in a local legend. According to the story, the King of Kanauj, Raja Jasdhaval, his wife Rani Balampa and a delegation of servants and dancers went on a pilgrimage to the shrine of the goddess Nanda Devi, not far from the lagoon. Your licentious behavior unleash the wrath of divinity it annihilates them in a second with a rain of rocks, leaving all the dead part at the skeleton lake. Some time later, badysis of some of Roodpkund's bones revealed impacts consistent with a storm of these features. The myth would refer to a disaster that occurred during a pilgrimage trip around the ninth century.

Now, a new badysis of 38 skeletons collected around the lagoon offers new information and expands the mysteries. The international team, led by geneticist David Reich of Harvard University in the US, and Niraj Rai of the Birbal Sahni Paleo Science Institute in Lucknow, India, conducted several badyzes separating them from individuals in three groups. . In the face of what was believed until now, many of the dead never met, died centuries ago, and probably came from areas thousands of kilometers apart.

Radioactive carbon dating found that 23 people died between the seventh and tenth century, probably at different times. The genetic badysis of this group indicates that all are related to the current inhabitants of India, but are not part of a single population.

The most surprising of these results, published in the magazine Nature Communications, arrives with the second group in size, consisting of 14 individuals. Carbon indicates that they died around 1800 and that they own the genes of their closest relatives, who live today in the eastern Mediterranean, specifically in Greece and Crete. . What did 14 travelers from the Mediterranean part of the Ottoman Empire do two centuries ago in a Himalayan lagoon at 5,000 meters altitude? You might think that these aliens were actually descendants of warriors who conquered the area several centuries ago together Alexander the Great, but the genetic badysis does not record the mixtures that should have been produced for more than a millennium in India.

For the arrival of the first group of skeletons, the researchers think that the trip had a religious purpose. "The practice of pilgrimages to the lake thus, or even in the valleys or summits of the region, it was common centuries ago, so we consider it as the most likely way for the remains to end there, "says researcher Ayushi Nayak. The Max Planck Institute for the Study of Human History in Jena (Germany) and co-author of the study, Nayak however recognizes that despite the large number of similar lakes having religious significance in the Himalayas they do not know "another who has human remains scattered around him, like Lake Roopkund."

Another interesting fact published by the Reich and Rai team it's the same proportion of men, 23, and women, 15, found among the dead. This would make it unlikely the possibility of military expeditions. Moreover, the sequenced subjects were not close relatives, rejecting the idea that the skeletons belonged to family groups.

For the moment, despite the large amount of information provided by this latest study, the Roopkund Lagoon will lose nothing of its mystery. Even Rai, the main author, shows his astonishment at the fact that "so many individuals have traveled on this lake", believing that getting there "is very risky and requires three days of rest. ; ascent. " "We are surprised to see so much human activitybut our studies can not say why they went there, "he concludes On the possibility that Mediterranean travelers are pioneers of tourism that is swamping the region today, the researcher is skeptical:" There are ten or fifteen years ago, there was tourist activity on this lake, but we can not totally reject this interpretation ".