The Lake of Skeletons: Roopkund Between the Goddess's Curse and Ancient DNA

A ranger's discovery

In 1942, in the middle of the Second World War, a forest ranger named H. K. Madhwal was patrolling a remote corner of the Garhwal Himalaya, in what is now the Chamoli district of Uttarakhand. At about 5,000 metres above sea level, below the slopes of the peak called Trishul, he came upon a small, frozen lake in a bowl of rock and scree, long known to the shepherds and pilgrims of the valleys but unknown to the outside world.

As the summer sun softened the ice, he saw what lay in and around the water. Bones. Hundreds of human bones, scattered along the shore and visible beneath the clear, shallow water. Skulls, ribs, limbs. In places, scraps of preserved flesh, hair, leather sandals and other remains.

The British authorities, who then governed India, were alarmed. Their first fear was that these were Japanese soldiers who had crept into India through the mountains and died in the cold. A team was sent to investigate. It quickly became clear that the bodies were far too old for that. But no one could say who these people were, when they had died, or why so many of them had died in one place.

The lake came to be called Roopkund, and in the decades since, it has also been known by a darker name: Skeleton Lake. It has become one of the most haunting archaeological puzzles in Asia.

The people who live in the valleys below always had their own answer. It was a story about a king, a pilgrimage and an angry goddess. For a long time, scientists treated that story as charming folklore. Then they began to test it, first with radiocarbon dating and finally with ancient DNA. What they found matched part of the legend surprisingly well. It also revealed a mystery that no legend, and no scientist, had predicted.

The goddess and the king

To understand Roopkund, you have to understand Nanda Devi.

Nanda Devi is the second-highest mountain in India, at 7,816 metres, and for the people of Garhwal and Kumaon she is not only a mountain. She is a goddess, a form of Parvati, and a daughter of these hills. Local tradition says that she was married into the household of Shiva, who lives at Kailash beyond the mountains to the north. Like any daughter who has married into a distant home, she must from time to time be escorted back to her in-laws.

That escort is the Nanda Devi Raj JatRaj Jat The royal pilgrimage that escorts Nanda Devi back to Shiva's home, held about once every twelve years., one of the longest and most demanding pilgrimages in the Himalaya. Held roughly once every twelve years, it is a procession of about 280 kilometres over three weeks, crossing high passes and alpine meadows. At its head walks a four-horned ram, said to be born in the region before each Raj Jat, which carries the goddess's offerings and is finally released into the high mountains alone. And the route of the Raj Jat passes directly by Roopkund.

The legend of the skeletons is told in folk songs sung along this route. In one version, a king named Jasdhaval, ruler of Kannauj in the plains, set out on the pilgrimage with his pregnant queen, Balampa, and a large retinue that included servants, porters and dancing girls. The goddess's pilgrimage is meant to be undertaken with austerity and purity. The king's party, so the story goes, did not respect that. They brought luxury and entertainment into the sacred mountains, and the queen gave birth on the route, which was considered polluting.

Nanda Devi's anger fell upon them. A terrible storm of hail "as hard as iron" struck the party near the lake, and everyone died.

The landscape still carries the story. One meadow on the route is called Patar Nachauni, which local people link to the dancing girls who are said to have performed there and been punished. The bones at Roopkund are, in this telling, the remains of the king's doomed pilgrimage.

It is a vivid story of pride and punishment. It is also, as it turned out, partly testable.

The first science: hail and radiocarbon

For decades after their discovery, the bones were investigated only sporadically. Visitors and trekkers took skulls and bones as souvenirs, and the site was damaged long before it was properly studied.

In 2004, a team of Indian and European scientists, supported by National Geographic, took a fresh look. Radiocarbon dating of the remains suggested that the people had died around the ninth century CE. Studying the skulls, the anthropologist Subhash Walimbe and colleagues found that many of them had short, deep cracks and wounds on the tops of the head and shoulders, the kind of injuries that would be caused by blows from small, round, hard objects falling from above. There were no signs of weapon wounds.

The conclusion was striking. A severe hailstorm, with hailstones perhaps as large as cricket balls, could explain the injuries. Caught in the open on a high slope with no shelter, a group of travellers could have been killed in a single event. The ice and cold of the lake would have preserved their remains.

In other words, science seemed to confirm the core of the legend. A party of pilgrims had died together, struck by "iron" hail from the sky. Only the explanation differed: a mountain storm rather than a goddess's wrath. Many people concluded that the mystery of Roopkund was essentially solved.

They were wrong.

What the DNA said

In August 2019, a large international team, led by the Harvard geneticist David Reich's laboratory with Indian and other collaborators, published a study in the journal Nature Communications that turned the story upside down. The lead author was Éadaoin Harney. The team had extracted ancient DNA from the bones of 38 individuals from Roopkund, along with radiocarbon dates and chemical analyses of their diets.

The results revealed not one group of people, but three.

Read that table slowly, because almost every line of it was a surprise.

First, the dates. The individuals in group A did not all die in a single event. Their dates spread over a period that may have lasted centuries, suggesting that people died at Roopkund in a series of separate incidents, perhaps several, during the period around the eighth and ninth centuries.

Second, the gap. The members of group B died around 1800, roughly a thousand years after group A. The bones of people from two utterly different eras had been lying jumbled together in the same small lake.

Third, and most astonishing, the ancestry. Group B were not Indian at all. Their DNA most closely resembled that of people living in the eastern Mediterranean today, particularly on the island of Crete. Chemical analysis of their bones confirmed that their diets had been different too: the South Asian individuals had eaten varied diets, including millet and other plants typical of different parts of India, while the Mediterranean group showed little sign of the millet and other crops typical of the region.

Fourth, the single individual in group C had ancestry typical of Southeast Asia, adding yet another strand to the mystery.

The study also looked for DNA from disease-causing bacteria, in case an epidemic had killed the travellers. It found none, though the authors caution that such DNA may simply have been too scarce to detect. And none of the sequenced individuals were close relatives of one another.

Mediterranean pilgrims in the Himalaya?

How did a group of people with Mediterranean ancestry come to die beside a remote lake on a Hindu pilgrimage route in the Himalaya, around 1800?

The honest answer, as of today, is that nobody knows.

The researchers considered several possibilities. Perhaps they were travellers or adventurers who had joined the Nanda Devi pilgrimage. Perhaps they were trying to cross the mountains for some other reason entirely. The team also asked whether they came from a community of Mediterranean descent long settled in India, but the genetics argued against it: such a community would show mixing with South Asian neighbours, or the signs of marrying within a small group, and this group showed neither. More likely, they were men and women born in the eastern Mediterranean, in the period of Ottoman rule, who travelled to the Himalaya. There are no known historical records of such a group, and no sign so far of the possessions that might identify them.

The study's authors were careful to stress how much remains unknown. They had sampled only some of the bones. Many others had been removed, scattered or destroyed over the decades. The full story of Roopkund is still being written.

How do you read DNA from a thousand-year-old bone?

It is worth pausing on how the 2019 team could say so much about people who died centuries ago, because the methods are almost as remarkable as the results.

Finding the DNA. After death, DNA begins to break apart. In old bones it survives, if at all, as tiny fragments, often fewer than a hundred "letters" long, mixed with DNA from bacteria, fungi and soil. Scientists have learned that one part of the skeleton preserves DNA far better than any other: the petrous bonepetrous bone The densest bone in the body, around the inner ear; it keeps ancient DNA better than any other., a small, extremely dense bone that encloses the inner ear at the base of the skull. Drilling a few milligrams of powder from it can yield usable human DNA even from remains thousands of years old. Cold places like Roopkund help, because low temperatures slow the breakdown. At Roopkund, the cold had kept enough DNA that the team could drill it from long bones instead.

Keeping it clean. The greatest danger is contamination. A single sneeze or a fingerprint from a modern researcher can swamp the faint ancient signal. So the work is done in specialised clean rooms, with researchers wearing full-body suits, and with chemical and computer checks for the characteristic damage patterns that genuinely ancient DNA shows, which modern contamination does not.

Reading ancestry. Once the DNA fragments are sequenced, they are compared with genetic data from thousands of living and ancient people from around the world. People from the same broad region share particular patterns of genetic variation, so each Roopkund individual can be placed on a kind of genetic map. That is how the team could say that one group resembled people living in India today, while another clustered with people from Crete and mainland Greece.

Reading diet. Bones also record what a person ate. Plants capture carbon from the air in slightly different ways: most plants, such as wheat and rice, use one chemical pathway (called C3), while some grasses, such as millet, use another (called C4C4 A way of fixing carbon used by millet and some grasses; it leaves a different carbon signature in the bones of those who eat them.) that leaves a different ratio of carbon isotopes. Those ratios pass into the bones of the people who eat them. Nitrogen isotopes, similarly, reflect how much meat or fish a person consumed. From these signals, the researchers could tell that the South Asian individuals had eaten a range of different diets, including millet for some, while the Mediterranean group had not.

Reading the date. Finally, radiocarbon dating of the bones gave each individual an approximate date of death. Living things absorb a small amount of radioactive carbon-14 from the atmosphere, and after death it decays at a known rate. Measuring how much remains reveals how long ago the person died, usually within a range of a few decades to a century or so.

Put those methods together, and a pile of anonymous bones becomes a set of individual biographies: where a person's ancestors came from, what they ate, and roughly when they died. None of these techniques existed when H. K. Madhwal found the lake in 1942. Some of them did not exist even when the 2004 hailstorm study was done. Every generation of scientists has been able to read a little more of Roopkund's story.

How a lake keeps the dead

Why did Roopkund preserve these remains, when so many other travellers lost in the Himalaya simply vanished?

The lake's physical setting explains a great deal. Roopkund lies at about 5,000 metres, in a hollow carved by glaciers, fed by snowmelt and frozen for most of the year. The water is shallow and extremely cold. Decay is a biological process, carried out by bacteria and other organisms, and like all such processes it slows dramatically in cold conditions. In the near-freezing water and frozen ground, bodies decomposed far more slowly than they would have done in a warmer place. In some cases, soft tissue was preserved for centuries.

The lake's shape matters too. It sits in a bowl beneath steep slopes. Rock falls, avalanches and meltwater can carry material downhill into it. It is possible that some of the bodies died on the slopes above and were later carried into the lake, which would help explain why remains from different eras ended up mixed together.

Hailstorms of the kind described in the legend and the 2004 study are entirely real in the Himalaya. Large hail forms in powerful thunderstorms when strong updraughts carry ice particles repeatedly through freezing layers of cloud, adding layer upon layer of ice. In mountainous regions, where storms build rapidly over high ground, they can be sudden and violent. For a group caught on an exposed slope at that altitude, with thin air, little shelter and no way to escape quickly, a severe storm could be deadly.

So the hail theory has not been disproved. The 2019 team's own examination of the bones found unhealed fractures, of the kind a violent hailstorm could cause, in three individuals. Hail may well explain some of the deaths, especially in the South Asian group. What the DNA showed is that it cannot be the whole story, because the dead belonged to different times and different peoples.

What the legend got right

It is tempting, after a scientific study like this, to declare the legend "debunked". That would be both unfair and inaccurate.

Look at what the folk tradition preserved.

• Pilgrims died at the lake. The genetic and dietary evidence strongly suggests that the South Asian individuals were a diverse group of people from different parts of India, exactly what one would expect from pilgrims on a great regional pilgrimage. The lake lies directly on the route of the Nanda Devi Raj Jat. It is reasonable to think that many of the dead were indeed pilgrims, on their way to honour the goddess.
• Death came from the sky. The skull injuries studied in 2004 are consistent with a hailstorm, the "iron hail" of the folk songs.
• The date is plausible. Inscriptions in temples near the route, dated to between the 8th and 10th centuries, suggest the pilgrimage itself is that old: the same centuries in which the South Asian group died. The legend of Jasdhaval itself cannot be dated precisely.
• The mountains are dangerous for the careless. The core moral of the story, that the high mountains must be approached with humility and preparation, is simple physical truth at 5,000 metres.

What the legend did not know, and could not have known, is that the lake had claimed lives across many centuries, not in a single catastrophe, and that among the dead were people whose ancestors came from the other side of the known world. The legend explained the lake with a single story. The DNA revealed many stories layered on top of each other.

A mountain that has been crossed for millennia

The presence of foreigners in the Himalaya around 1800 is less strange than it might first seem.

The Himalaya has never been a sealed wall. Trade routes crossed it for thousands of years, carrying salt, wool, gold, horses, spices and ideas between India, Tibet and Central Asia. Traders from the BhotiyaBhotiya Communities of the high Himalayan valleys who long traded across the passes into Tibet. communities of these very valleys carried goods over high passes into Tibet until the mid-twentieth century. Pilgrims came to the great shrines of Badrinath and Kedarnath from all over the subcontinent, and Buddhist pilgrims and monks crossed these ranges in both directions.

By 1800, the Indian subcontinent was a meeting place of many peoples. European, Armenian, Persian, Arab and other merchants and adventurers were scattered across India, and some communities of foreign origin had lived here for generations. It is not impossible that a group with Mediterranean roots found itself on a Himalayan trail, whether as pilgrims, traders, soldiers or explorers. What remains unexplained is who they were, why they were there, and what happened to them.

The Roopkund skeletons are a reminder that history is always more crowded than the stories we tell about it.

Protecting the lake

The bones of Roopkund have suffered badly from human attention. For decades, trekkers picked up skulls and bones, carried them away, or rearranged them for photographs. Some remains were moved into piles near the shore. Each of those acts destroyed information that can never be recovered: the position of a body, its relation to others, its context.

In 2018, the Uttarakhand High Court ordered restrictions on overnight camping in the fragile high-altitude meadows, the bugyalsbugyals The high alpine meadows of Uttarakhand, grazed in summer and easily scarred by camping., along this route, to protect them from damage caused by heavy trekking traffic. The broader lesson is clear. Places like Roopkund are not tourist curiosities. They are graves, and they are archives.

If you trek there, the best way to honour the dead, and the goddess whose mountain they died beneath, is to leave everything exactly as you find it.

The claims, checked

The lake that keeps its secrets

There is something fitting about Roopkund's refusal to give up its full story.

For centuries, the people of these valleys explained the bones with a single, powerful tale: a king who forgot humility, a goddess who would not be disrespected, a storm of iron from the sky. It was a story that taught people how to behave in the mountains, and it was not wrong about the danger.

Then scientists came with radiocarbon machines and DNA sequencers, and the story became larger and stranger. People from many parts of India, dying across centuries. Strangers from the Mediterranean, dying a thousand years later in the same cold water. A lone traveller from Southeast Asia. Each of them had a home, a family, a reason for being on that slope. Almost none of those reasons are known.

The legend gave the bones one meaning. The science gave them back their many separate lives, and admitted it could not yet name them. That may be the most honest kind of knowledge there is: the kind that tells you exactly how much it does not know.

Nanda Devi still stands above the lake. Every twelve years or so, the pilgrims still pass, singing the old songs. And every summer, as the ice melts, the lake gives up a few more of its dead, waiting for someone to read their story.

Further reading

• É. Harney, A. Nayak, N. Patterson et al., "Ancient DNA from the skeletons of Roopkund Lake reveals Mediterranean migrants in India", Nature Communications (2019)
• Subhash R. Walimbe (Deccan College, Pune) and colleagues, studies of the Roopkund skeletal remains (2004 onwards)
• Documentary: Riddles of the Dead: Skeleton Lake, National Geographic (2004)
• William S. Sax, Mountain Goddess: Gender and Politics in a Himalayan Pilgrimage (1991), on Nanda Devi and the Raj Jat
• Uttarakhand High Court, order on high-altitude meadows (bugyals) (2018)