Roopkund Lake in the Indian Himalayas has several hundred bodies scattered around and within it , earning the nickname “ Skeleton Lake ” . Local tales refer to an ancient party caught in a heap hailstorm . However , an analysis of the ages and genome of the bones unveil something much stranger and harder to explicate : the victims were separated by 1,000 year and had very different blood line .
site 5,000 measure ( 16,400 feet ) above ocean level , Roopkund is high than any mountain in Western Europe or the contiguous United States , so get there is far from easy . It ’s also just 40 meters ( 130 feet ) across . However , something must have made it deserving the effort because when a team from many university sample the genome - wide-cut DNA from 38 of Roopkund ’s skeletons , they found three very distinct ethnicities .
As gestate , the legal age were Indian , but the DNA of 14 others reveals eastern Mediterranean , most likely Greek island , inheritance . A single individual ’s ancestry seem to have been in Southeast Asia , almost as distant in the opposite management .
Moreover , rather of a single violent storm killing them all , radiocarbon geological dating indicates the locals died more than 1,000 years ago , while the visitant were much more late , probably around 1800 AD . More queerly still , the older group appear to have come from many parts of India , with at least two centuries between the older and youngest of that population .
“ Through the usance of biomolecular analyses , such as ancient DNA , static isotope dietary reconstructive memory , and carbon 14 dating , we break that the history of Roopkund Lake is more complex than we ever anticipated,”Professor David Reichof Harvard Medical School suppose in astatement , “ and raises the spectacular interrogative sentence of how migrants from the easterly Mediterranean , who have an ancestry visibility that is extremely irregular of the area today , died in this place only a few hundred years ago . ”
The findings have been published inNature Communications , marking the first report of the successful collection and analysis of whole genome ancient DNA from India . DNA seldom survives well in hot climates and the high-pitched - altitude lake is one of the few places on the subcontinent moth-eaten enough to uphold it .
The findings are so improbable that Reich and co - source check out them by test the bones ' isotope , confirm great variation in their diets and probable places of origin .
One part of the local stories does seem to be true : Some of the skulls found at the site show damage logical with being hit by large hailstones , and almost half were charwoman . Yet none of those sampled were related to each other . The authors think they were Pilgrim walking to a nearby temple , but ca n’t excuse the more late population .
