Located in the lap of the Indian Himalayas, Roopkund or better known as the “Skeleton or Mystery Lake” is a high altitude glacial lake sits in the Uttarakhand state of India. Roopkund is a scenic vacationer destination and one of the significant places for trekking in Chamoli District, Himalayas, near the base of two Himalayan peaks: Trisul (7,120 m) and Nanda Ghunti (6,310 m). The region around the lake is still uninhabited by the civilization as it is some 16,500 feet above the sea level and is bounded by rocky glaciers and snow-clad hill. This lake is one hundred and thirty feet in diameter and two-meter-deep; remains frozen for the most part of the year. Roopkund is famous for hundreds of early human skeletons that can found at the edge of the lake.
During summers, once the snow starts melting, the human skeletons start becoming visible in the clear water at the bottom of the lake. This leads to a ghastly scene as hundreds of human skeletons, some even with flesh still attached to them, appear from the Skeleton Lake.
The skeletons were discovered by Nanda Devi Game reserve ranger named Mr Hari Kishan Madhwal in the year 1942. There are reports that these remains date to the late 19 century. Initially, the British authorities were petrified assuming that the skeletons signified fatalities of a secreted Japanese assault army. Though it was later brought forward that the remains were too old to be Japanese soldiers. Along with the bones, wooden objects, iron spearheads, leather slippers, and rings were also discovered.
The questions arise, who were these people and what happened actually to them. It is said that they died instantaneously in a disastrous happening more than 1,000 years ago. An unpublished anthropological investigation from quite a few years ago studied five skeletons and projected they were 1,200 years old.
Surprisingly, a new hereditary investigation was undertaken out by experts in India, the United States of America and Germany has overturned that theory. In the research which scrutinized DNA from 38 bones, specifies that there wasn’t just one huge disposal of the corpses, but numerous, spreading over to an era.
Geneticists Niraj Rai and Manvendra Singh at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology at Hyderabad directed DNA tests on numerous samples of remains taken from the Roopkund lake and likened them with the present India people. The results brought forward that 70 per cent of them had an association with Iranians, whereas the outstanding ones belonged to the local citizens. It is theorized that the Iran group took the assistance of Uttarakhand’s local labours to find new land to settle on.
It is often rumoured among the local residents that the King of Kanauj, Raja Jasdhaval, with his expecting wife, Rani Balampa, their helpers, a dance group and others went on a trip to Nanda Devi shrine, and the group encountered a disastrous hurricane with huge hailstones, from which the whole group froze near Roopkund Lake. The investigations of the skeletons exposed a mutual reason for the demise: blows to the back of the head, triggered by round substances falling from above. The investigators settled that the dead had been stuck in an unexpected hailstorm.
Roopkund has been a matter of discussion among all the Anthropologists around the world for several decades now, but still very little is known about the origin of its skeletons. Interference of rockslides, drifting ice and human visitors have disturbed and stimulated the remnants, making it grim to decrypt how & when these humans were buried, and very less about their belongings. “In a case like this, that becomes impossible,” said Cat Jarman, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Bristol in England who was not part of the exploration squad.
Hereditary scrutiny has helped a long way to throw some light & make some sense of the castoffs of carcasses. The scholars, directed in chunk by Niraj Rai, an expert in prehistoric DNA at the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences in India, and David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard University, haul out DNA from the remnants of loads of gaunt samples, and were able to identify 23 males and 15 females from the lot.
Based on residents active today, these entities fit into three discrete hereditary assemblages. Twenty-three, together with males and females, had lineages typical of present-day South Asians; their relics were placed at the lake flanked by the seventh and 10th centuries, and not all at once. Some carcasses were added prehistoric than others, signifying that several were buried at the lake generations away from each other.
Then, perchance 1,000 years or so later, erstwhile amid the 17th and 20th centuries, two added hereditary collections unexpectedly appeared in the interior of the lake; one individual of East Asian-related lineage and, inquisitively, 14 individuals of eastern Mediterranean lineage.
No one knows how all these people met their end at that place. Since there’s no evidence of bacterial infections, even an epidemic cannot be blamed for the deaths. Conceivably the stimulating high-altitude atmosphere evidenced deadly.
The former learning, of five skeletal models, originated three with unhealed density fractures, feasibly imposed by massive sleets, even though that inference is uncluttered to deliberation. In any case, transversely a variety of epochs “it’s hard to believe that each individual died in exactly the same way,” said Éadaoin Harney, a doctoral apprentice at Harvard and the prime writer on the study.
The entities counted in offspring and ageing adults, but not a single person was a family kinsfolk. Chemical monikers from the skeletons specify that the individuals had pointedly diverse nourishments, totalling sustenance to the concept that numerous discrete inhabitants’ clusters are characterized.
If financial records of their expeditions happen someplace, nobody has been exposed so far. “We have searched all the archives, but no such records were found,” Rai said.
The scholars know that Roopkund Lake is located on a course recognized to modern-day Hindu visitors, so perhaps some of the South Asian people deceased while taking part in the same. But it is less likely to elucidate the incidence of people from an aloof eastern Mediterranean.
Conceivably they weren’t essentially Mediterranean emigrants. Their inherited lineage bears a resemblance to that of modern people from Greece or Crete, but existing spreading may not smear to prehistoric populaces. Irrespective of the fact that this assemblage came from someplace far from Roopkund Lake, for unknown reasons.
Perhaps the place apprehended implication for assemblies with numerous spiritual theories. Possibly some of the carcasses were transported for entombment, probably to be left in the lake. Or mayhap there were ill-fated voyagers — motivated by a want to see a remarkable massif range, slaughtered by their own inquisitiveness.
A bunch of scarce responses have commenced appearing, at least. Archaeology is full of such unfathomable sites and when science comes along and billets in, “it augments the story in infinite ways.”
