High in the Himalayas, a four- to five-day trek from the nearest village, is a modest glacial lake called Roopkund. The place is beautiful, a jewel-colored blob of water amid rough gravel and rubble, but hardly out of the ordinary for the rugged landscape – except for the hundreds of human bones scattered around the lake.
These bones, belonging to between 300 and 800 people, have been a mystery since a forest ranger first reported them to the wider world in 1942. Recently, however, the mystery has only deepened. A new genetic analysis of the old will follow in 2019 DNA in the bones, detailed in the diary Nature Communications, found that at least 14 of the people who died at the lake were probably not from South Asia. Instead, their genes match those of modern humans in the Eastern Mediterranean.
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Plus, these bones were much newer than most of the others at the lake, dating back to around 800; the people of seemingly Mediterranean heritage seem to have died instead around 1800. So what the hell did a group from the Mediterranean do above 16,500 feet (5,029 meters) in a far-flung corner of the Himalayas? And how did they die?
Deadly ridge
Those questions are at the heart of a new article in The New Yorker by Douglas Preston, as well as one subsequent webinar discussion led by Preston and Princeton University anthropologist Agustín Fuentes and hosted by the School for Advanced Research in New Mexico.
Roopkund’s story illustrates the need for multiple lines of evidence when examining the past. The bones alone are puzzling: they belong to both men and women, usually young adults, who appear to have died at different periods, perhaps tens or hundreds of years.
Oral histories handed down by the villagers near Roopkund provide more relief. The lake is on a pilgrimage route for Nanda Devi, a manifestation of the Hindu goddess Parvati. According to local legend, a distant king once angered Nanda Devi, causing drought over his kingdom. To appease the goddess, the king set out on a pilgrimage that took him and his retinue past Roopkund. But the foolish king brought dancers and other luxuries to the trek, adding to Nanda Devi’s anger. She conjured up a terrible hailstorm and killed the whole party, the legend goes.
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This story may not be far from the truth. Some victims in Roopkund have skull fractures that look like the result of blunt force trauma, research has foundThe current best guess for what happened to the most deaths? They were caught on the ridge above the lake in terrible storms, some of which had potentially deadly hail. Most of the victims probably died of exposure and hypothermia; they ended up in and around the lake because their bodies either rolled downhill or their remains slammed down the hill in the frequent mini-avalanches common on the slope.
Constant mystery
However, there is no consensus as to what a group of people with an apparently Mediterranean heritage was doing in such a corner of the Himalayas around 1800; then there is no historical record of a long-haul expedition to the region, Preston said.
The finding hints at the limits of ancient DNA analysis, Fuentes said in the Feb. 3 webinar. The analysis compared the DNA of the lakeside skeletons with the DNA of modern populations. But humans have moved around quite a bit in the intervening 200-plus years, making it a bit difficult to say exactly where the dead came from at the lake. They may not have come straight from the eastern Mediterranean, Fuentes said; they could have come from closer to Roopkund, but shared common ancestors with the people who eventually populated the eastern Mediterranean.
However, there is non-DNA evidence that the people in the mystery group weren’t like the others who died at the lakes. The 2019 analysis also found that this group had a different diet, with less millet, than the people whose genetics suggested South Asian origin.
One theory is that the mysterious deaths in Roopkund may have come from an isolated population of Central Asians descended from Alexander the Great and its armies. The Kalash, an ethnic group in Pakistan, owe part of their ancestry to these conquerors, Harvard University geneticist David Reich and colleagues wrote in their 2019 paper. But the mysterious dead have no genetics like the Kalash, which is East Mediterranean genetic markers with South Asian markers, and they do not show any of the signs of inbreeding that would be evident if they did not mix with the wider South. Asian population around them.
“By combining several lines of evidence, the data instead suggests that we sampled a group of unrelated men and women born in the Eastern Mediterranean during the period of Ottoman political control,” the researchers wrote. As suggested by their consumption of a predominantly terrestrial, rather than marine-based diet, they may have lived inland and eventually traveled to the Himalayas and died. Whether they were on a pilgrimage or were attracted to Roopkund. Lake for other reasons, is a mystery. “
Part of the reason this mystery persists, Preston said, is that Roopkund isn’t actually well studied. The lake is on a relatively popular trekking route, and hikers have moved, stacked, and even stolen bones over the decades. Due to the turbulent weather and high elevation, no systematic studies of the remains and their location have been done.
But that could change one day. For his article in The New Yorker, Preston Veena interviewed Mushrif-Tripathy, a bioarchaeologist at Deccan College in India who hopes to conduct scientific research into Roopkund. It’s likely there are bodies in the lake that haven’t been disturbed, Mushrif-Tripathy told Preston. Soft tissue and artifacts can even be kept in the cold water. If researchers can launch such an expedition, they may be able to light the lives of some of those who died at the lake.
Originally published on Live Science.