<div class="text-justify">

What comes to your head when you hear the name “skeleton lake”? This is the nickname of Roopkund lake, a small lake in the Himalayas which has numerous numbers of skeleton in its shores and it wasn't until 1942 before the remains were actually acknowledged when a forest officer found them.

Around the shores of the lake, people come there to pick a lot of things including artifacts which makes it difficult for archeologist to do their jobs and talking about doing their jobs, while there are a lot of Jones in the shore of the lake, there is no single full skeleton. With this, archeologists cannot tell how or when these people died also, archeologists are not able to tell much about the time of their death since artifacts that could have been carbon dated are no longer on the site since visitors that go there already took them all. While we cannot specifically tell how these people got to the lake and how they met their ends, a lot of theories have been made to explain what could have led to the scene.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/Roopkund%2C_Trishul%2C_Himalayas-2.jpg</div>
[wikimedia](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Roopkund,_Trishul,_Himalayas-2.jpg)

In the 1940s when it was first found, the British believed it was the remains of Japanese soldiers who wanted to invade them. Another theory says the bones are remains of traders who died as a result of harsh weather. The Hindu people also have their own story about the situation and the bones there but I am not talking about that today.

In all this, scientists were able to come up with something and in 2023, a paper was published and archaeologists claimed that the remains on the shore was a combination of people of different ages ranging from adolescent to elderly. In the paper, the scientists also stated that the people showed sign of nutritional deficiency such as being anemic before they died which could be as a result of not having proper sunlight or good food. 


https://live.staticflickr.com/631/22404199985_294a25131a_b.jpg
[flickr](https://www.flickr.com/photos/abhijeetrane/22404199985)


But before this journal, there was a journal published in 2019 which showed that the bones were a combination of males and females and so this could have canceled the believe of the 1940s that they were possibly Japanese soldiers. The journal also pointed out that there were elderly women in the group and a lot of the skulls showed compression fracture which led to speculations that they had experienced a storm possible hailstorm which is believed to be something that happens at the site.

With complex cases comes complex resort and so scientists resorted to radiocarbon dating and they found that some of the remains dated back to 800CE. Also, using SNPs and Mitochondria Haplogroup Determination, scientists discovered that the people there were from three genetic distinct groups that lived about 1000 years ago. Also,  using different techniques including Carbon and Nitrogen isotopes, they were able to identify what they might have eating while they were alive and they realized that there were three different groups of people eating different diets which confirmed that more than 1 group of people were at the lake. 

Scientists believed that the first group dating back to about 800CE had South Asian related ancestry, another bone sample showed sign of east related ancestry, and the third group which is still quite decent was from eastern Mediterranean origin. In all I have said, scientists have norlt been able to identify specifically what led to the death of these people. Overtime, scientists will be able to work on these bones so as to find more details about it but until then, we have our fingers crossed.

_____
______
#### <center>Read More</center>
_______
_______

* https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-11357-9
* https://www.heritageuniversityofkerala.com/JournalPDF/Volume6/58.pdf
* [https://www.heritageuniversityofkerala.com/Publications/P1/42](https://www.heritageuniversityofkerala.com/Publications/P1/42_Barthwal%20and%20Walimbe_PPJ_20230131.pdf)
* https://ignca.gov.in/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/NKBose007b.pdf
* [http://luna.cas.usf.edu/~rtykot/PR39](http://luna.cas.usf.edu/~rtykot/PR39%20-%20Enrico%20Fermi%20isotopes.pdf)
* https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1235544/
* https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/roopkund-skeleton-lake/596416/
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X2200102X
* https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210705-the-unsolved-mystery-of-skeleton-lake
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1872497321001721
* https://customercare.23andme.com/hc/en-us/articles/212880257-Maternal-Haplogroups-mtDNA