The mystery of the mass grave at Roopkund, a glacier in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, known only as India’s Skeleton Lake, remains unsolved. According to local legend, the bodies were found in the lake in the Trishul Mountains during a blizzard. However, analysis of the age and genome of the bones showed that the victims resting in the glacier were separated from each other by more than 1,000 years, and that the people resting in the water belonged to different ethnic groups. He writes Life.is.
Roopkund Lake came into the limelight after Indian forest officer Madhaval noticed thousands of bones in the water in 1942. Madhaval immediately reported this to the authorities, but the Bone Lake issue did not become public until the end of the 1950s.
David Reich, a professor at Harvard Medical School, told Iflscience.com about the latest research findings He saidWith the help of biomolecular analysis, stable isotope and DNA diet reconstruction, and radiocarbon dating, we have obtained a more complex picture of the history of Roopkund Lake. The researchers analyzed 38 selected skeletons.
The investigation showed that the bodies were the remains of people who died at three different ages and belonged to different races.
On the one hand, the remains of people from South Asia who lived between the 7th and 10th centuries can be found in the lake, and on the other hand, the bones of travelers who wandered here in the 19th century, supposedly from Crete. In addition, the excavations also identified the bodies of people from Southeast Asia from the 19th century.
According to some researchers, the story of the famous ice storm appears to be true in the case of those who died in the first millennium, as injuries to the skulls are consistent with the damage caused by such a storm. It is believed that the people who fell into the lake as a result of the natural disaster might have been pilgrims coming to the temple near Roopkund. However, we still have not received an answer as to how bodies from the 19th century ended up in Skeleton Lake.
(Abel Julias)
