For anyone unfamiliar, this is Lake Roopkund. On the surface, it resembles an ordinary mountain lake, but what's hidden beneath is what makes it genuinely unsettling.
It was found in 1942 by a forest ranger. Tucked deep within the Himalayas at an elevation of 5,029 meters, Lake Roopkund is a modest body of water, roughly 40 meters wide, frozen solid for most of the year, though it reveals a considerably darker side once warmer months arrive. It holds the skeletal remains of over 100 individuals.
Beyond local folklore, an early scientific theory proposed it resulted from some catastrophic event roughly 1000 years back, perhaps a severe landslide or a lethal hailstorm.
More recently, scientists from India, the US, and Germany backed up this theory through DNA analysis and radiocarbon dating on 38 of these skeletal remains.
The research team identified 23 male and 15 female remains, and using comparisons with current populations, sorted them into three distinct genetic groups:
- The first group, made up of 23 individuals of mixed genders originating from South Asia, likely arrived here sometime between the 7th and 10th centuries;
- The remaining two groups, dated nearly 1000 years later, spanning the 17th through 20th centuries, include one person showing traits linked to modern East Asia, plus 14 others surprisingly connected to the Eastern Mediterranean region, possibly Greek or from Crete.
The most plausible explanation for the first group points to the Nanda Devi Raj Jat pilgrimage, an event still held every 12 years today. But the second and third groups remain unexplained, largely because there's no clear reason Europeans would have traveled so far from home.