DNA showed Himalayan Skeleton Lake holds people who died a thousand years apart
A shallow Himalayan lake at over 5,000 metres gives up hundreds of skeletons each summer when its ice melts. For decades everyone assumed a single deadly hailstorm had killed a royal pilgrimage. Genetic testing then revealed South Asians from around 800 CE lying beside a group with Greek and Cretan ancestry who died roughly a millennium later.
Roopkund sits in a bowl beneath the Trishul massif in Uttarakhand, rarely more than 40 metres across and about three metres deep, frozen for most of the year. In 1942 a forest ranger named Hari Kishan Madhwal came across the bones. British officials briefly worried they belonged to a hidden Japanese invasion force, until it became clear they were far too old. Iron spearheads, wooden objects, leather slippers and rings lay among them, and when a National Geographic team recovered about 30 skeletons in 2003, some still had flesh preserved.
Local legend tells of Raja Jasdhaval of Kanauj, travelling with his pregnant queen, servants and dancers on a pilgrimage to the Nanda Devi shrine, all killed by huge hailstones. Early studies seemed to agree. Skulls showed injuries from round objects striking from above, and Oxford radiocarbon tests dated the deaths to about 850 CE.
A genome-wide study of 38 individuals overturned the single-disaster story. Twenty-three people with typical South Asian ancestry died around 800 CE, and their remains seem to have accumulated over a long span. Fourteen others, dated to about 1800 CE, matched people from mainland Greece and Crete, while one individual of similar date had mostly Malay ancestry. These later remains appear to have arrived in one event, and nobody yet knows what brought eastern Mediterranean travellers to a Himalayan pass.
Remains of more than 300 people have been found in all, but they are disappearing. The district magistrate has reported trekkers and curious visitors hauling bones away on mules. Autumn is the best trekking season, usually a five-day climb from Lohajung through high meadows, and every twelve years the Nanda Devi Raj Jat festival brings worshippers of the goddess Nanda to the lake.
Source: Roopkund
