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High in the Himalayas, a four to five day walk from the nearest village, is an unpretentious glacial lake called Roopkund. The place is beautiful, a dollop of jewel-toned water amid gravel and rough scree, but hardly out of the ordinary for the rugged landscape – save for the hundreds of human bones scattered throughout and around the lake.
These bones, belonging to between 300 and 800 people, have been a mystery since a ranger first reported them to the world in 1942. Lately, however, the mystery has only deepened. In 2019, a new genetic analysis of the old DNA in the bones, detailed in the journal Nature communications, found that at least 14 of those who died at the lake were likely not from South Asia. Instead, their genes match those of modern populations in the eastern Mediterranean.
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In addition, these bones were much newer than most others in the lake, which date to around 800; people with an apparent Mediterranean heritage instead seem to have died around 1800. So what the hell was a Mediterranean group doing above 16,500 feet (5,029 meters) in a far corner of the Himalayas? And how did they die?
Deadly ridge
These questions are at the heart of a new article in The New Yorker by Douglas Preston, as well as a subsequent webinar discussion led by Preston University and Princeton University anthropologist Agustín Fuentes and hosted by the New Mexico School of Advanced Research.
Roopkund’s story illustrates the need for more than one piece of evidence to investigate the past. Bones alone are mystifying: They belong to both men and women, mostly young adults, who appear to have died in several episodes, perhaps over tens or hundreds of years.
Oral histories transmitted by the villagers near Roopkund provide more insight. The lake is on a pilgrimage trail for Nanda Devi, a manifestation of the Hindu goddess Parvati. According to local legend, a distant king once angered Nanda Devi, causing her to trigger drought on his kingdom. To appease the goddess, the king set out on a pilgrimage which led him and his entourage to Roopkund. But the Foolish King brought dancers and other luxuries on the trek, escalating Nanda Devi’s rage. She spoke of a terrible hailstorm and killed the whole group, according to legend.
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This story may not be far from the truth. Some of Roopkund’s victims have skull fractures that look like the result of blunt trauma, search found. The current best estimate of what happened to most of the deaths? They got caught on the ridge above the lake in horrific storms, some of which may have included deadly hail. Most of the victims probably died from exposure and hypothermia; they ended up in and around the lake because their bodies rolled downhill or their remains dragged down the hill in the frequent mini-avalanches common down the slope.
Mystery in progress
There is no consensus, however, on what a group of people with apparent Mediterranean heritage was doing in such a remote corner of the Himalayas around 1800; so there is no historical record of a long distance expedition in the area, Preston said.
The discovery hints at the limitations of ancient DNA analysis, Fuentes said during the February 3 webinar. The analysis compared the DNA of the lake’s skeletons with the DNA of modern populations. But people have moved a lot over the past 200 years, making it difficult to say exactly where the dead at the lake came from. They may not have been directly from the eastern Mediterranean, Fuentes said; they could have been closer to Roopkund but shared common ancestors with the people who ended up inhabiting the eastern Mediterranean.
There is non-DNA evidence that the people in the mystery group were not like the others who died in the lakes, however. The 2019 analysis also found that this group had a different diet, with less millet, than people whose genetics suggested a South Asian origin.
One theory is that the mysterious deaths at Roopkund could have come from an isolated population of Central Asians who descended from Alexander The Great and his armies. The Kalash, an ethnic group in Pakistan, owe part of their ancestry to these conquerors, wrote Harvard University geneticist David Reich and colleagues in their 2019 article. But the mysterious dead have no genetics like the Kalash, which mixes genetic markers from the Eastern Mediterranean with South Asian markers, and they show none of the signs of inbreeding that would be evident if they did not mix with the wider South. Asian population around them.
“By combining different sources of evidence, the data suggests rather that what we sampled is a group of unrelated men and women who were born in the eastern Mediterranean during the period of Ottoman political control,” wrote Researchers. “As their consumption of a predominantly terrestrial rather than marine diet suggests, they may have lived in an inland location, eventually traveling and dying in the Himalayas. Whether they were on a pilgrimage or were drawn to Roopkund Lake for other reasons is a mystery. “
Part of the reason this mystery persists, Preston said, is that Roopkund has not been well researched. The lake is on a relatively popular trekking route, and hikers over the decades have moved bones, stacked them, and even stolen them. Due to the stormy weather and the high altitude, no systematic study of the remains and their location has been carried out.
One day, however, that could change. For her article in The New Yorker, Preston interviewed Veena Mushrif-Tripathy, a bioarchaeologist at Deccan College in India who hopes to scientifically investigate Roopkund. It is likely that there are bodies in the lake that have not been disturbed, Mushrif-Tripathy told Preston. Soft tissue and artefacts can even be stored in cold water. If researchers can launch such an expedition, perhaps they could shed light on the lives of some of those who died at the lake.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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