Lake Roopkund, located in the Himalayas at an altitude of 5 thousand meters, is called the Lake of Skeletons by the locals. The fact is that both at the bottom and around this small and shallow lake are heaps of human bones.
Rumors of a gloomy lake have been circulating since the end of the 19th century, and when the Indian Madhwal, who is in the service of the British government, arrived here in 1942, he said he counted at least 500 skeletons on the lake shore (!).
From autumn to spring, this mountain lake freezes to the bottom, and when it thaws in summer, more and more bones crawl out of its depths. Locals from time to time carefully collect them in a heap, and when there are many such heaps along the banks, the lake looks even more surreal.
Early dating through radiocarbon dating showed that these people died about 800 years ago. Later, genetic and biological analysis showed that most of the victims were men and they lived in the 8th century AD.
What did so many people (with whom there were horses) need in those years in this godforsaken place at such a high altitude? There is no historical information that there were any religious or trade routes in these places.
And what killed them? Assumptions were made about mass suicide or natural disaster (avalanche, landslide, large hail). But it could also be a mass sacrifice.
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And recently this lake has asked another riddle. Scientists conducted a detailed DNA analysis of the remains of 38 people and found that the dead people belonged to as many as three genetic groups from different places.
The first group of 23 people had genetic links with modern inhabitants of India, the second group of 14 people unexpectedly showed the DNA of peoples living near the Mediterranean Sea, namely in Greece and on the island of Crete. The third group of 1 person comes from Southeast Asia.
“We were extremely surprised at the genetics of the skeletons from Lake Roopkund. The presence of people from the Mediterranean region shows that this lake was not just some random body of water in the Himalayas, but something special that attracted people from all over the world,”says lead author Edoyne Gurney of Harvard University.
At the same time, two groups of three were separated from each other by almost a thousand years, thus early dating was inaccurate. It turns out that mass deaths of people occurred at Lake Roopkund twice (!).
The first time this happened somewhere between the 7th and 10th centuries AD, and then the stunted inhabitants of India (presumably from the Brahmin caste) died, and the second time people died here somewhere between the 17th and the beginning of the 20th century. And during the second disaster, they were travelers from the Mediterranean and Southeast Asia.
The results of the new study were published in the journal Nature Communications, but alas, they again did not provide any clue as to who these people were and why they got here. And what (or who?) Killed them.