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Hundreds of skeletons fill this remote Himalayan lake. How did they get there? - Livescience.com

Hundreds of skeletons fill this remote Himalayan lake. How did they get there? - Livescience.com

Hundreds of skeletons fill this remote Himalayan lake. How did they get there? - Livescience.com
Feb 24, 2021 2 mins, 0 secs

In 2019, a new genetic analysis of the ancient DNA in the bones, detailed in the journal Nature Communications, found that at least 14 of the people who died at the lake probably weren't from South Asia?

Instead, their genes match those of modern-day people of the eastern Mediterranean?

Related: 11 famous places that are littered with dead bodies.

What's more, these bones were far newer than most of the others at the lake, which date to around 800; the people with apparent Mediterranean heritage seem to instead have died around 1800.

Most of the victims likely died of exposure and hypothermia; they ended up in and around the lake because their bodies either rolled downhill or their remains sloughed down the hillside in the frequent mini-avalanches common on the slope. .

There's no consensus, however, on what a group of people of apparent Mediterranean heritage was doing in such a remote corner of the Himalayas around 1800; there's no historical record of a long-range expedition to the region then, Preston said.

But people have moved around quite a lot in the intervening 200-plus years, making it a little difficult to say exactly where the dead at the lake came from.

They may not have hailed directly from the eastern Mediterranean, Fuentes said; they could have been from closer to Roopkund but shared common ancestors with the people who ended up populating the eastern Mediterranean.

There is non-DNA evidence that the people in the mystery group weren't like the others who died at the lakes, though.

One theory is that the mysterious dead at Roopkund could have been from an isolated population of Central Asians who descended from Alexander the Great and his armies.

But the mystery dead don't have genetics like the Kalash, which mix eastern Mediterranean genetic markers with South Asian markers, and they don't show any of the signs of inbreeding that would be evident if they didn't mix with the wider South Asian population around them. .

"Combining different lines of evidence, the data suggest instead that what we have sampled is a group of unrelated men and women who were born in the eastern Mediterranean during the period of Ottoman political control," the researchers wrote.

Whether they were participating in a pilgrimage, or were drawn to Roopkund Lake for other reasons, is a mystery.".

Part of the reason this mystery persists, Preston said, is that Roopkund has not actually been well studied.

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