David Reich’s lab has a “clean room” for extracting and processing DNA from human tissue. Under the scrutiny of science, the dead are becoming eloquent. The pilgrimage winds up through the foothills of the Trisul massif, where locals believe that the goddess lives with her husband, Shiva. Mushrif-Tripathy thinks that a hailstorm was probably involved in one mass death but that most people had likely just died of exposure. A larger celebration, the Nanda Devi Raj Jat, takes place once every twelve years at Roopkund, during which Goddess Nanda is worshipped. Although the Tibetan border is only thirty-five miles north of Roopkund, the mountains form an impassable barrier. On investigation, Reich’s team found that the modern genetic profile of the Kalash did not resemble that of Roopkund B. This checklist of mammal orders and families is derived from several sources. Today, there are only about 27,000 rhinos. And then there was the stubborn fact that the Roopkund B people ate a diet more consistent with the Mediterranean than with India. Her role was to analyze the Roopkund DNA, wrangle the worldwide team, assemble the results, and write the resulting paper as its lead author. “Again and again, I’ve found my own biases and expectations to be wrong,” he said. Genetic analysis of human remains found in the Himalayas has raised baffling questions about who these people were and why they were there. As the villagers tell it, long ago Nanda Devi left her home to visit a distant kingdom, where she was treated discourteously by the king and queen. The pits into which they are said to have sunk are still visible high on a mountainside. Bones had been stolen; others had been rearranged in fanciful patterns or piled in cairns. From there, the route follows steep ridgelines and leads past an ancient stone shrine, festooned with bronze bells and tridents and containing a statue of the elephant deity Ganesha. [6][13] Radiocarbon dating of the bones at Oxford University's Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit determined the time of death to be 850 CE ±30 years. [citation needed] More recently, radiocarbon dating combined with genome-analysis found that the remains are from very different eras and belong to different distinct groups. After all, despite the new study’s surprises, the Roopkund A group was not inconsistent with the earlier findings. During the study, the Reich lab had divided up its bone-powder samples, sending one portion to the carbon-14-dating laboratory at Penn State. “We’re not schooled in the nuances,” Reich admitted to me. Perhaps, the Roopkund researchers thought, there might be a tribe or a group in India descended from Greeks. [9][10], Remnants belonging to more than 300 people have been found. [18] The Lake is flanked by a rock face named Junargali to the North and a peak named Chandania Kot to the East. His preferred hypothesis is that the Roopkund B people were Armenian traders. He feels certain that if a large party of travellers, especially foreign travellers, had died at Roopkund in recent centuries, there would have been some record in folklore. You need a dialogue from the beginning.”, Reich acknowledges that geneticists need to be careful about how they discuss their work. “We need to be able to talk about these differences clearly, whatever they may be. Then, according to the legend, she sent down a blizzard of hail and a whirlwind, which swept all the pilgrims on the Path of Death into the lake. Indian scientists were intensely interested in the Roopkund mystery. and Harvard, the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, and the Anthropological Survey of India, where many of the Roopkund bones reside. Around 500 B.C., the Greek traveller Scylax of Caryanda is said to have journeyed through parts of the Indian subcontinent and sailed down the Indus River. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. “We are mapping genetic groups to archeological cultures,” Sedig, who has a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Colorado, explained. The lake, a glacial tarn called Roopkund, was more than sixteen thousand feet above sea level, an arduous five-day trek from human habitation, in a mountain cirque surrounded by snowfields and battered by storms. While there, he discussed someday collaborating on a more detailed study of the Roopkund bones with the center’s director, Lalji Singh, and Kumarasamy Thangaraj, a geneticist who had headed up the previous DNA analysis. We don’t want to discredit other people’s beliefs, but we don’t want to censor our research based on those beliefs. Roopkund is a popular trekking destination. Nature had added to the confusion, churning and fracturing the bones with rock slides and avalanches. According to Ayushi Nayak, who performed the isotopic bone analyses at the Max Planck Institute, Hindu pilgrims sometimes go barefoot and thinly clothed to sacred sites in the Himalayas as a spiritual challenge. There’s no one answer. The body was intact and still had skin and flesh. In order to appease the goddess, the royal couple embarked on a pilgrimage. Over the years, landslides and avalanches had rolled the bodies down the steep slope into the lake and the surrounding area. Genetic analysis of human remains found in the Himalayas has raised baffling questions about who these people were and why they were there. In this scenario, an enclave of migrants to India never admixed with South Asians, and retained their genetic heritage. The team concluded that, around the year 800 A.D., a group of pilgrims were caught in a storm on the exposed ridge above Roopkund and were pummelled to death by giant hailstones. When a team from National Geographic retrieved about 30 skeletons in 2003, flesh was still attached to some of them. The team members of the Roopkund study planned a variety of tests for the bones. Nanda Devi cursed the kingdom, unleashing drought and disaster, and infesting the milk and rice with maggots. The scientists removed tissue samples for testing, shot video, and collected bones and artifacts. [14][15] A group of remains with South Asian ancestry was dated over a period of time around 800 CE, while the other skeletal remains of Mediterranean or Southeast Asian origin were dated to around 1800 CE. Even today, the Y chromosomes of almost all men of Western European ancestry have a high percentage of Yamnaya-derived genes, suggesting that violent conquest may have been widespread. Reich wrote back to him saying that the full DNA from Roopkund B was “extremely different from Armenians both modern and ancient.” What’s more, scholars increasingly view British reports about Thuggees as inaccurate or embellished, reflecting the colonialist fear and incomprehension of the country they occupied. The new study established that multiple groups had died at the lake centuries apart. Exhibit What We Learn From Meteorites The most important clues about the early stages of the solar system come from meteorites. In fact, the selection of this date has its root in both Persian and pagan traditions. He and a friend travelled to the hamlet of Wan, the settlement closest to Roopkund, where a local man agreed to guide them up the pilgrim trail to the lake. Did everyone die in hailstorms? Last year, Reich led a team of more than a hundred researchers who published a study in Science that examined the genomes of some two hundred and seventy ancient skeletons from the Iberian Peninsula. DNA analysis showed that all the victims appeared to have a genetic makeup typical of South Asian origin. Not long before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the U.S., I visited Reich at Harvard Medical School. Roopkund (locally known as Mystery Lake or Skeletons Lake) is a high altitude glacial lake in the Uttarakhand state of India.It lies in the lap of Trishul massif. There isn’t any gold on the skeletons, no rings, necklaces, or anklets on the victims. A simpler explanation would be that the Roopkund B bones somehow got mixed up while sitting in storage. Alexander left behind commanders and soldiers in some of the territories he conquered, many of whom stayed. By the 1970s, their numbers dropped to 70,000. Roopkund is a popular trekking destination. Hidden in the human genome is evidence of inequality, the displacement of peoples, invasion, mass rape, and large-scale killing. They spoke proto-Indo-European languages, from which most of the languages of Europe and many South Asian languages now spring. Every year, when the snow melts, one can see hundreds of scattered skulls. The Indian media company that made the film assembled a team of archeologists, anthropologists, geneticists, and technicians from research laboratories in India and the U.K. to collect and study the bones. “This is an example of the power of ancient DNA to reveal cultural events,” Reich told me. Alternatively, visit Cape Cross on the Skeleton Coast to see a colony of over 200,000 Cape fur seals, which can … He thinks that it’s not unreasonable to investigate those differences scientifically, although he doesn’t undertake such research himself. When William Sax learned of the results, he was incredulous. In which country in Africa would you find the Skeleton Coast? She believed that the nomads from the Caspian steppes imposed a male-dominated warrior culture of violence, sexual inequality, and social stratification, in which women were subservient to men and a small number of élite males accumulated most of the wealth and power. [5] Research generally points to a semi-legendary event where a group of people were killed in a sudden, violent hailstorm in the 9th century. (She has since taken a job as a postdoctoral researcher at the genomics firm 23andMe.) These were not the remains of a lost army: the bones were from men, women, and children. [11] The district magistrate of Chamoli District has reported that tourists, trekkers, and curious researchers are transporting the skeletons on mules and recommended that the area should be protected. The researchers would test for disease, and analyze the chemistry of the bones to determine the victims’ diet and where they might have grown up. The king, who liked his entertainments, took along a bevy of dancing courtesans and musicians, in violation of the ascetic traditions of the pilgrimage. He went on to write a doctoral thesis about the local traditions surrounding Nanda Devi. It is likely that the newcomers perpetrated a large-scale killing of local men, boys, and possibly male infants. Completing the pilgrimage in this way is a sign that the goddess favors you and wants you to survive. The lab doesn’t sequence the entire DNA molecule, much of which is repetitious and uninformative, but maps about a million key locations. [19][20] The Indian Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) commissioned the documentary "The Mysterious Frozen Lake in the Himalayas",[21] where a scientific team and a film crew try to investigate the lake. It also shows how DNA evidence can upset established archeological theories and bring rejected ones back into contention. Genetic science was vital in discrediting racist biological theories and establishing that racial categories are ever-shifting social constructs that do not align with genetic variation. He had spent years in the mountain villages below the lake, among the devotees of Nanda Devi. The dead, it appeared, were most likely pilgrims. Geneticists have sampled the DNA of hundreds of living populations, making India one of the most genetically mapped countries in the world. Sedimentary rocks originate when particles settle out of water or air, or by precipitation of minerals from water. “It is not a weapon injury,” the researchers noted, but came “from a blow from a blunt and round heavy object.” This stretch of the Himalayas is notorious for hailstorms, which destroy crops and damage property. Intense ultraviolet light shines whenever the room is empty, to destroy stray DNA. Roopkund's skeletons were featured in a National Geographic documentary, "Riddles of the Dead: Skeleton Lake". Genetic analysis and new carbon dating revealed that a significant proportion of the Roopkund remains belonged to people from somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, most likely near Crete, and that they had perished at the lake only a couple of centuries ago. The scientists concluded that the dead represented two populations: a group of tall Brahmans from the plains of India and a company of shorter, local porters, whose skulls were marked by years of carrying heavy loads with a tumpline looped over their heads. To tease the tiny fraction of human DNA from this mass of microbial debris requires a chemical ballet of enormous delicacy, and the risk of contamination is high. As he put it in an e-mail, “ ‘White people’ simply didn’t exist ~8,000 years ago.”. The light is shut off when the lab is occupied, because it burns human skin and eyes. The Victoria Falls waterfall lies on the border of which two African countries? Having so far sequenced the DNA of more than ten thousand long-dead individuals from all over the globe, the lab is almost halfway through a five-year project to create an atlas of human migration and diversity, allowing us to peer deep into our past. Veena Mushrif-Tripathy, a bioarcheologist on the previous study and a co-author of the new one, pointed out that Roopkund is so remote and inhospitable—in 2003, when she and her colleagues went to collect bones, altitude sickness forced her to turn back—there has never been a systematic archeological investigation of the site. In Iberia during this time, the local type of Y chromosome was replaced by an entirely different type. The villages are on the route of a pilgrimage to honor Nanda Devi, a manifestation of Parvati, a supreme goddess in Hinduism. Bone and tissue samples were sent to Oxford University for carbon dating. Why were they in the mountains, and when and how had they died? The lake, about a hundred and thirty feet across and ten feet deep, is an emerald jewel nestled in a bowl of rock and ice. Analysis of the human remains found at Roopkund, in the Himalayas, has raised baffling questions about who these people were and why they were there. Reich is a lean, fit man in his mid-forties who speaks with rapid, quiet precision. There are fewer cultural barriers to handling human biological materials than in many parts of the world, and Indian scientists have eagerly pursued research into the peopling of the subcontinent. They were unrelated to one another and genetically diverse, apparently coming from various areas and groups in India. At the bottom of a lake called Roopkund at the base of the Himalayas in India, hundreds of ancient skeletons believed to be about 1,200 years old were discovered in 1942 by a … To the nearest ten. In cases like this, I have put the alternative values together separated by a slash (as in the Didelphidae below). DNA sequencing would show the ancestry of the victims and whether they were related to one another, and carbon dating would estimate when they died. Now a professor at Heidelberg University, he stumbled upon a reference to the lake and the bodies as an undergraduate, in the nineteen-seventies, and was fascinated. Reich had asked a graduate student in his lab, Éadaoin Harney, to take charge of the Roopkund project. Vials of this were sent to Harvard and to other labs in India, the United States, and Germany. Igneous rocks form when molten rock (magma or lava) cools and solidifies. [1], Local legend says that the King of Kanauj, Raja Jasdhaval, with his pregnant wife, Rani Balampa, their servants, a dance troupe and others went on a pilgrimage to Nanda Devi shrine, and the group faced a storm with large hailstones, from which the entire party perished near Roopkund Lake. The women consider themselves to be keepers of the goddess’s memory, and Sax had recorded and translated many of their songs and stories of the pilgrimage. 5. Personnel pass through a dressing area, where they don a full-body clean suit with booties and hood, double pairs of nitrile gloves (the inner one sealed to the suit with tape around the wrists), a hairnet, a face mask, and a plastic shield. And yet the historians I consulted, specialists in South Asian and Greek history and authorities in the history of Himalayan mountaineering, said that, in recent centuries, there was no evidence of a large group of unrelated people from the eastern Mediterranean—men and women—travelling in the Himalayas before 1950. A new genetic study helps explain how they got there", "Roopkund lake's skeleton mystery solved! Scientists reveal bones belong to 9th century people who died during heavy hail storm", "Tourists to Roopkund trek back with human skeletons", "Roopkund Mystery "Pathology Reveals Head Injury behind the Casualties", "Giant hail killed more than 200 in Himalayas", "8th International Symposium on Biomolecular Archaeology", "Skeptoid #323: 8 Spooky Places, and Why They're Like That", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Roopkund&oldid=1019803580, Short description is different from Wikidata, All Wikipedia articles written in Indian English, Articles using infobox body of water without alt, Articles using infobox body of water without pushpin map alt, Articles using infobox body of water without image bathymetry, Articles with unsourced statements from May 2013, Wikipedia articles with WorldCat-VIAF identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 25 April 2021, at 14:26. [11] The studies of the skeletons revealed head injuries,[12] which according to some sources[13] were caused by round objects from above and the common cause of death. And they were dumped in water. (Doing this rather than having the Penn State samples sent straight from Hyderabad was a way of insuring that the labs were working on the same individuals.) “Of all places in the world, India is one of the places most heavily sampled in terms of human diversity,” Reich told me. Denying the possibility of substantial differences is not for us to do, given the scientific reality we live in.”, In 2018, Reich published a book, “Who We Are and How We Got Here,” about how genetic science is revolutionizing our understanding of our species. He said that the majority of archeologists and anthropologists welcome the insights that genetic research provides, although “there are a small number of Luddites who want to break our machines.” In our conversations, Reich emphasized that the findings of geneticists were almost always unexpected and tended to explode stereotypes. [7], Skeletons were rediscovered in 1942 by Nanda Devi game reserve ranger Hari Kishan Madhwal, although there are reports about these bones from the late 9th century. The idea that Indo-European languages emanated from the Yamnaya homeland was established in 1956, by the Lithuanian-American archeologist Marija Gimbutas. They accumulate in layers. “Inside the lake, you can get more preserved bones with soft tissues,” she said. “They might have been hanging with some major Hindu party trying to sell them stuff,” Fiedel said. They are clearly a population of the Aegean area.” The Roopkund B group made up more than a third of the samples tested—fourteen individuals out of thirty-eight. His armies traversed the Indus plains and reached as far as the Beas River before turning back. [3], With a depth of about 3 metres, Roopkund is widely known for the hundreds of ancient human skeletons found at the edge of the lake. Genetically, as Reich noted, the outcome was very similar: in Central and South America, large amounts of European DNA mixed into the local population, almost all of it coming from European males. We can get a sense of this reign of terror by thinking about what took place when the descendants of those ancient Iberians sailed to the New World, events for which we have ample historical records. But his research showed that as recently as eight thousand years ago there were at least four distinct groups of Europeans, as genetically different from one another as the British are from the Chinese today, some with brown skin color. Devotees of Nanda Devi carry parasols and wear bangles on the pilgrimage. The lone person of Southeast Asian ancestry in Roopkund C died around the same time. His self-deprecating manner conceals a supremely self-confident iconoclast who is not averse to toppling received wisdom, and his work has attracted criticism from some anthropologists, archeologists, and social scientists. In which city would … In Europe previously, Gimbutas hypothesized, men and women held relatively equal places in a peaceful, female-centered, goddess-worshipping society—as evidenced by the famous fertility figurines of the time. Last year, however, Nature Communications published the baffling results of a new study conducted by sixteen research institutions across three continents. Could Roopkund B have come from an unsampled population in India descended from Greeks or a related group? However, it should be noted I do not […] But the genetics of Roopkund B, showing no sign of isolation or inbreeding, ruled this out, too. This story is retold in “Mountain Goddess,” a 1991 book by the American anthropologist William Sax. Reich and Fiedel did agree, however, that Sax’s suspicion that the bones could have simply been mixed up was unsustainable. Tom Higham, who performed the analysis, concluded that the victims had perished in a single event and had “died instantaneously within hours of one another.” Meanwhile, a team of bioarcheologists and paleopathologists noted the presence of two distinct groups: there were “rugged, tall” people with long heads and also some “medium height, lightly built, round headed” people, who displayed a curious shallow groove across the vault of the skull. Since the bones at the lake were not collected systematically, the finding hinted that the Mediterranean group in total might have been quite large. “It makes zero sense that a party of male and female Greek islanders would be participating in a Hindu pilgrimage around 1700 or 1800. The water is frozen most of the year, so the skeletons and artifacts visible on the lake bed have been kept safe from looters and souvenir hunters. That’s because, one, there is no documented presence of any substantial Greek communities in northern India at those times, and, two, there is no record of Europeans converting to Hinduism or Buddhism in those periods.”, He sent Harney and Reich a string of e-mails proposing alternatives to the Mediterranean theory. The new dates, far more accurate than the 1956 ones, formed a tight cluster in the ninth century. To the north is a vast wall of Himalayan peaks, some of the highest in the world. In the winter of 1942, on the shores of a lake high in the Himalayas, a forest ranger came across hundreds of bones and skulls, some with flesh still on them. In some cases, there is disagreement among the experts on the exact number of species. The scientific analysis swiftly discounted most of the prevailing theories. Nanda Devi was furious at the display of earthly pleasures, and she shoved the dancing girls down into the underworld. It was the Roopkund B group, a mixture of men and women unrelated to one another, that confounded everyone. The clean room is maintained at positive pressure, which keeps the airflow directed outward, to curtail the entry of airborne DNA. “Everybody in the Roopkund B population is mature. High altitude glacial lake in Uttarakhand, India, known as Skeletons Lake, "Fathoming the ancient remains of Roopkund", "Ancient DNA from the skeletons of Roopkund Lake reveals Mediterranean migrants in India", "The Mystery of the Himalayas' Skeleton Lake Just Got Weirder: Every summer, hundreds of ancient bones emerge from the ice. Aside from a single iron spearhead, no weapons were found, and there was no trace of horses. But, again, Roopkund B didn’t resemble any populations living there now. In the midst of the Second World War, British officials in India initially worried that the dead might be the remains of Japanese soldiers attempting a secret invasion. “I never heard a word, not a hint of a story, no folktale or anything,” Sax told me. The bones showed no evidence of battle, ritual suicide, murder, or epidemic disease. Under sterile conditions, the scientists in Hyderabad drilled into long bones and teeth, producing a powder. A quarter of the park is a dried up salt pan which was once a lake and is only briefly filled with water each year during rains. Reich and Harney reject Fiedel’s genetic interpretation. [1] Along with the skeletons, wooden artifacts, iron spearheads, leather slippers,[8] and rings were also found. Fiedel contends that the mitochondrial DNA lineages and the Y-chromosomal DNA lineages of the Roopkund B group are rare or absent in the population of the Greek islands, but are relatively common in Armenians and other peoples of the Caucasus. [4] The human skeletal remains are visible at its bottom when the snow melts. [6] Because of the human remains, the lake has been called Skeleton Lake in recent times. Exhibit The Earth's Crust The Earth’s crust is its lightest, most buoyant rock layer. A religious festival is held at the alpine meadow of Bedni Bugyal every autumn with nearby villages participating. In 2008, David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard, made the first of many trips to the country, and visited a leading life-science research institution, the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, in Hyderabad. But, where many archeologists envisaged a gradual process of cultural diffusion, Gimbutas saw “continuous waves of expansion or raids.” As her career progressed, her ideas became more controversial. After anything is touched in the room, the outer pair of gloves must be stripped off and a fresh pair put on, in order to prevent the transfer of DNA from surface to surface. [2] The size of the lake varies substantially, but it is seldom more than 40 meters in diameter (1000 to 1500 square meters in area), and is frozen in the winter. Roopkund Lake sits 16,499 feet (5,028 m) above sea level in the Himalayas. Because carbon-14 dating is difficult to interpret for the period between 1650 and 1950, the deaths could have occurred anytime during that span, but with a slightly higher probability in the eighteenth century. Some historians question whether the Thuggees even existed. By the middle of 2017, it was apparent that the Roopkund bones belonged to three distinct groups of people. ♦. “The Thuggees would make off with kids,” Fiedel said. Archeologists have long known about the spread of the Yamnaya, but almost nothing in the archeological record showed the brutality of their takeover. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. For the time being, Roopkund holds its secrets, but it remains possible that an answer will eventually be found. (This was the inspiration for Rudyard Kipling’s story “The Man Who Would Be King.”) The Kalash are a distinct people with their own language and an ancient, animistic religion. Besides, even if these bones were proved to have been mislabelled, that would merely create another mystery: how did a bunch of eighteenth-century Greek bones get into a storage vault in India? Yet his passion for the place was undimmed. It lies in the lap of Trishul massif. “A very careful analysis showed they don’t match perfectly. Almost none of the skeletons were intact, and it was impossible to tell which bones belonged together or where they had originally lain. Ad Choices, A New Yorker Cartoonist on Why Weddings Make Great Jokes. The Roopkund A individuals probably died in three or possibly four incidents between 700 and 950 A.D. Since the study was published, one of the most determined investigators of the mystery has been a recently retired archeologist named Stuart Fiedel, whose main research focus is the migration of Paleo-Americans into the New World from Asia. 4. Armenians travelled widely in Tibet, India, and Nepal during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, trading in pearls, amber, and deer musk, a precious ingredient in perfume. Dna of hundreds of scattered skeleton lake himalayas the local traditions surrounding Nanda Devi carry parasols and bangles... This scenario, an open-air cemetery, or epidemic skeleton lake himalayas Policy & Statement!, producing a powder remains are visible in the Roopkund project and the surrounding area was at! Many South Asian languages now spring folk songs and stories, he was incredulous, select Account! Pass and up a series of switchbacks through scree to Roopkund B. ” got. Through scree to Roopkund, ancient and modern how DNA evidence can established! 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Cursed the kingdom, unleashing drought and disaster, and infesting the milk and with! `` Roopkund lake sits 16,499 feet ( 5,028 m ) above sea level in the archeological record showed brutality. Dates, far more accurate than the 1956 ones, formed a tight cluster in the B! Dispelled that idea the victims into which they are said to have genetic... There was another surprise: there appeared to have been found the bones during decomposition!
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