SOMEWHERE among the snowy mountain tops of the Indian Himalayas lay hundreds of skeletons – but no one has any idea where the chilling human remains have come from.
Roopkund Lake in India’s Uttarakhand state, bordering Nepal, remains a fascinating mystery for researchers ever since a forest ranger came across it.
The macabre scenes only unfold for one month a year, when the lake’s frosty waters melt over enough for onlookers to catch a glance.
Nestled between the snow and land, passersby are confronted with the grim reality of human bones when temperatures rise and snow subsides – at a staggering incline of around 16,000ft.
The morbid image is almost something out of a gory Hollywood blockbuster; several carcasses assembled beneath the surface of a often frozen glacial lake.
Researchers estimate around 500 human remains sit there – and dozens speculate what left them in this freezing, uninhabitable part of the South Asian nation.
What makes the mystery concerning the Himalayan body of water even more chilling is its conditions that are so harsh that hikers have to trek for five days to tackle it.
The difficulty of the journey suggests to scientists that there may still be 400 undiscovered bodies next to the lake.
One popular theory is that the eerie scenes, first spotted by the Brit ranger in 1942, come from a pilgrimage calamity of sorts.
As home to the world’s oldest religion, it comes as no shock that devotees would trek to the Hindu-majority nation for worship.
But it’s more likely the remains come from pilgrims as the stunning lake forms part of the route for Nanda Devi Raj Jat, still observed by followers of the polytheistic religion who pass through the scary site.
Indian mythology says King Jasdhaval of Kannauj took his dancers and pregnant wife to Roopkund to visit the Nanda Devi shrine, a temple dating back a thousand years or so.
The group were allegedly caught in a heavy storm and subject to hail so vicious they all perished beside the lake – slowly morphing into skeletons.
Other theories that have done the rounds include ideas the dead were locals returning from war or were invading the Japanese.
But scientists aren’t convinced on this after they analysed the DNA of 37 of the creepy skeletons.
The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, found that most of them died around 1,000 years ago – but not necessarily at the same time.
Shockingly, they detected that some of the people may have died as recently as the 19th century.
Perhaps even more odd is that researchers found the vast majority of their DNA to come from the Mediterranean, thousands of miles from the Indian mountains.
The discrepancy in time indicates that this may not have been a large-scale disaster, but a series of mysterious deaths staggered over centuries.
Harvard geneticist David Reich told The Atlantic: “It may be even more of a mystery than before.
“It was unbelievable, because the type of ancestry we find in about a third of the individuals is so unusual for this part of the world.”
He explained that remains may have scattered around the area and fallen into the lake during landslides over time.
But Kathleen Morrison, from the University of Pennsylvania’s anthropology department explained a Greek kingdom existed in the Indian subcontinent for around 200 years, starting in 180 BC.
She said: “The fact that there’s some unknown group of Mediterranean European people is not really a big revelation.
“I suspect that they’re aggregated there, that local people put them in the lake. When you see a lot of human skeletons, usually it’s a graveyard.”
