High in the Himalayas lies Lake Roopkund. It’s a five-day walk from the nearest village, in the middle of nowhere, and yet hundreds of skeletons have been found at the bottom of it. It’s a mystery that has perplexed the internet for decades. But now there’s some DNA evidence that give us some answers – and way more questions.
TRANSCRIPT
One of the first theories was that these were Japanese soldiers who tried to enter British India during World War Two.
That’s a reasonable explanation.
The Imperial Japanese Army launched Operation U-Go across the border from Burma into northeast India in March 1944. Their goal was to capture Kohima and Imphal [IM-fahl]
But that theory was quickly dismissed because the bones were too old. And no weapons or military equipment was found, either.
Oh, and DNA tests showed that the skeletons were of Indian origin.
So, maybe not modern soldiers. Maybe older ones?
This theory was that the bodies belonged to General Zorawar Singh [zo-RAH-war Sing] of Kashmir and his men.
It was rumored that they died in the middle of the Himalaya region after being caught in bad weather while returning from the Battle of Tibet in 1841.
Still, no weapons from that time period were found.
And even if they were ancient warriors, there were no weapons, horses, or beasts of burden found.
Could it have been a massive graveyard? Possible, except for the fact that a lot of the skeletons were young and healthy when they died.
How about a ritual sacrifice or an un-alive yourself theory? Interesting, but there were no known traditions like that in the area.
Maybe all those skeletons were the result of an epidemic.
Again, the remains looked healthy. That would also suggest that people lived there, but there wasn’t any evidence of that.
One of the interesting things found was that several skeletons had cracked skulls. Like, a blunt force had been applied to them. This led to a theory that caught on in a big way. The weather in this area can quickly turn violent.
When researcher William Sax traveled and lived among the locals there, he visited the lake and got caught in a blizzard.
He almost died, but he landed on a theory about what may have killed those in the lake.
Hail. A massive hailstorm may have killed them all in one instance.
But why would groups of people risk their lives in an area known for violent weather? Why trek through a place far from civilization?
No. My dude. Please.
Nanda Devi is a local goddess who resides on the region’s highest mountain. There are many shrines and temples dedicated to her.
While she’s primarily a benevolent deity, she can take the form of Durga, a wrathful goddess. So, villagers treat her with great respect. They sacrifice buffalo and goats to her during certain festivals or whenever they think they may have offended her. One festival is called the Nanda Devi Raj Jat Yatra [Rahj Juht Yuh-truh], and it still happens today. In fact, one is happening this year, 2026.
It’s a three-week pilgrimage over a 5,100-meter pass that goes by Lake Roopkund. Thousands of barefoot devotees walk with images of the goddess to the mountain bearing her name.
But one of these pilgrimages ended in disaster because the goddess was angry.
According to legend, a prince in a neighboring country fell in love with a princess in the area. But they consummated their marriage without performing the proper ceremonies at the time.
Nanda Devi got offended, and bad times fell on the kingdom.
The people tried to placate the goddess by going on a mass pilgrimage to her shrine high in the mountains.
But the prince, now king, didn’t take the pilgrimage seriously and brought dancing girls for entertainment. Nanda Devi didn’t like this, either, and destroyed the pilgrims with bad weather. So, the hailstorm theory is that a mass of people were caught in a hailstorm on their way to a shrine and died at Lake Roopkund.
Since there are a ton of skeletons, it looks like it was a massive event that happened all at once.
Maybe this pilgrimage-slash-hailstorm theory is correct. If so, when did it happen?
Turns out, that answer is a bit complicated.
An investigation in 2004 found evidence of musical instruments among the skeletons. A DNA analysis also revealed that the remains belong to both males and females across a wide age range. This reaffirmed the pilgrimage-hailstorm theory.
But then something remarkable happened in 2010. That’s when the first draft of a Neanderthal genome was sequenced. This advancement in ancient DNA sequencing helped us better understand how humans spread throughout the world.
It also opened up new research into Lake Roopkund.
Thirty-eight powdered bone samples from skeletal remains had been stored at the Anthropological Survey of India in Kolkata. They were sent to sixteen labs around the world for genomic and biomolecular analysis. After a five-year-long study, a paper published in Nature Communications in 2019 stunned the world. What the researchers found was weirder than a random lake full of bones.
Harvard’s Reich Laboratory led the research, which looked at ancient DNA, stable-isotope dietary reconstruction, radiocarbon dating, and bone analysis.
It found that the skeletons came from three genetically distinct groups, from different events separated by around 1,000 years.
The analysis of the thirty-eight remains showed that they included an almost even proportion of males and females. That ruled out any military expedition. There were also no relative pairs, meaning they weren’t the remains of family groups.
No bacterial pathogens, either. That crosses out the epidemic theory.
The main thing they found was that the thirty-eight Roopkund remains fell into three groups.
Twenty-three of them were South Asians. Fourteen were West Eurasians, and one person was from East Asian-related ancestry. The South Asians fall in line with the local population, but those West Eurasians? They primarily matched people who are originally from Crete and Greece.
The lab also did a dietary analysis.
Depending on how carbon is fixed during photosynthesis in plants, one of two chemical signatures emerges: C-Three or C-Four.
If you eat a diet of C-Three plants like barley, rice, or wheat, you’ll have that isotopic ratio of carbon in your bones. If you eat a diet high in millets, you’ll have C-Four stored in your bones. Turns out, the South Asian group had a variety of C-Three and C-Four in their bones, which is typical of much of India’s diet.
The West Eurasians group had mostly C-Three, which is typical of a Mediterranean diet.
Discovering multiple, genetically distinct groups among the remains raised a question: Did all these people die together or during separate events?
The lab used Accelerator Mass Spectrometry radiocarbon dating to determine the age of the remains.
They found that the South Asian and West Eurasian groups were separated by about one thousand years. Like, the South Asian group fell within the seventh to tenth C.E. range. The West Eurasian group and the lone East Asian individual were in the seventeenth to twentieth century range.
They even found evidence of non-overlapping deaths in the South Asian group. Like, one person’s death may have occurred between 675 and 769 C.E. Another’s between 894 and 985 C.E. But the West Eurasian group and the East Asian individual’s deaths may have happened during a single event. The researchers think a mass death during a pilgrimage is a plausible explanation for some of the South Asian individuals.
But they were puzzled by the West Eurasian group.
One thought is that they’re descended from Indo-Greek populations established after Alexander the Great’s time.
He would’ve contributed to the ancestry of some present-day groups, like the Kalash.
But that’s unlikely because the group would’ve had a mixture with groups more typical of South Asian ancestry, like the Kalash do.
The data suggests that they sampled a group of unrelated men and women born in the eastern Mediterranean during Ottoman rule.
And that they lived in an inland location and traveled to the Himalayas, where they died. The mystery is what they were doing there. Were they going on the pilgrimage?
The researchers wrote:
“It would be surprising for a Hindu pilgrimage to be practiced by a large group of travelers from the eastern Mediterranean where Hindu practices have not been common; Hindu practice in this time might be more plausible for a southeast Asian individual…”
Were the bones contaminated? Probably not since they were kept in storage. The lab’s scientists suggest future archival research should be done. This would help determine whether any foreign travel groups died in the region over the last few hundred years.
But for now, this part of the mystery remains unsolved.
So, how did all these people actually die?
The Nanda Devi pilgrimage is a good reason why they may have passed through the area. But why did they die in this specific location? Geography may be the answer.
Lake Roopkund is surrounded by tall mountains, including that knife-like ridge mentioned earlier.
Here’s my opinion:
The combination of a high, treacherous pass in an area prone to extreme weather events, a multi-day trek, and hundreds of people passing through every twelve years… well, it’s easy to imagine how a handful of events could lead to hundreds of people dying. Many of the remains had skull fractures. Maybe giant hail caused that. Or maybe these people fell.
Maybe there were a few instances when travelers met bad weather and were swept down the mountain, ending up in the lake. Or maybe they were shifted down to the lake over time by rockfalls.
In other words, it might just be an especially dangerous place. Given enough opportunity, disaster was destined to occur. Remember, only a small fraction of the bones have been tested.
Unfortunately, tourists have disturbed the site over the years. That complicates finding a definitive answer. But maybe someday a more extensive excavation could retrieve more bones, get a more accurate answer about who the people were, and give us a clearer picture of what happened.
The problem is that it’s so high up and remote that a full excavation is unlikely.
So, for now, what happened at Lake Roopkund remains a mystery.
Or…
Dear lord.
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