The mystery of India’s ‘lake of skeletons’
High in the Indian Himalayas, a remote lake nestled in a snowy valley is strewn with hundreds of human skeletons.
Roopkund Lake is located 5,029 metres (16,500ft) above sea level at the bottom of a steep slope on Trisul, one of India's highest mountains, in the state of Uttarakhand.
The remains are strewn around and beneath the ice at the "lake of skeletons", discovered by a patrolling British forest ranger in 1942.
Depending on the season and weather, the lake, which remains frozen for most of the year, expands and shrinks. Only when the snow melts are the skeletons visible, sometimes with flesh attached and well preserved. To date, the skeletal remains of an estimated 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 remains and puzzled over a host of questions.
Who were these people? When did they die? How did they die? Where did they come from?
One old theory associates the remains to an Indian king, his wife and their attendants, all of whom perished in a blizzard some 870 years ago.
They found that the dead were both genetically diverse and their deaths were separated in time by as much as 1,000 years.
"It upends any explanations that involved a single catastrophic event that lead to their deaths," Eadaoin Harney, the 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 certain that the deaths of these individuals cannot be explained by a single event."
But more interestingly, the genetics study found the dead comprised a diverse people: one group of people had genetics similar to present-day people who live in South Asia, while the other "closely related" to people living in present-day Europe, particularly those living in the Greek island of Crete.
Also, the people who came from South Asia "do not appear to come from the same population".
"Some of them have ancestry that would be more common in groups from the north of the subcontinent, while others have ancestry that would be more common from more southern groups," says Ms Harney.
So did these diverse groups of people travel to the lake in smaller batches over a period of a few hundred years? Did some of them die during a single event?
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