Why Is This Remote Lake Full of Hundreds of Skeletons?

this video is currently sponsored by manscaped find out more later in the video hey 42 here in a remote part of northern india on the edge of the world's highest mountain range a tiny lake lies tucked away in a glacial valley just 40 meters across and no more than three deep it isn't all that much to look at as far as lakes go at least not unless you take the time to amble to its very edge and pier beneath the eerily still crystal clear water because just beneath its surface this seemingly unremarkable himalayan lake hides human skeletons hundreds of them the skeletons of roopkund lake as it's known were first discovered in 1942 by a forest ranger working for the british who still ruled in india at the time it must have been a chilling experience stumbling across thousands of human bones strewn in and around a nondescript lake out there in the middle of nowhere more than 5000 meters above sea level but once the ranger and the british authorities who employed him got over their shock they were left facing a simple question how the hell did all those skeletons get there in the first place since april is national testicular cancer awareness month i just want to take a moment to talk about how important men's health issues are did you know one man every hour every day is diagnosed with testicular cancer you may think testicular cancer is something that only happens to other men but i like many others have a personal connection to someone who struggled with this terrible disease and i firmly believe it's not something we should feel embarrassed about but discuss openly because the more we do so the more we can all encourage men like you and i to take important preventative measures now if you've followed my channel for a while you'll know that i'm a big big fan of manscaped and their performance package kit the all-in-one grooming collection for the modern man not only do manscape provide the right tools for the job for safe and easy manscaping such as the lawnmower with skin safe technology they've also now partnered with the testicular cancer society in order to spread awareness for men's health and early cancer detection and you can perform simple routine self checks at home whilst enjoying manscaped products you use every day like their ball deodorant and ball toner giving yourself a regular check and manscaped go hand in hand literally visit manscapes.com forward slash tcs to learn how to check yourself for early signs of cancer or share their funny educational check yourself video to help save lives and balls as always you can use my code 42 for 20 off plus free shipping at manscapes.com join the manscaped movement and don't forget to take care of your pair it's time to get the deer stalkers out because we're in for a spot of archaeological detective work first let's consider the evidence we have a remote mountain lake concealing a large number of skeletons upper estimates suggest as many as 800 the bones are scattered far and wide around the scene and some have soft tissues and hair still attached suggesting whatever kills these people might have been relatively recent of the bones studied some of the skulls exhibit a strange shallow groove across the top of the forehead as if the bones had been worn away whilst others show more severe damage in the form of fractures that appear to have been caused by blunt force trauma from some kind of large round object striking directly from above so any ideas what might have happened here well combine a whole lot of dead people in one place with evidence of serious injuries and a reasonable place to start would be to assume these were soldiers of some kind unsurprisingly the british considered that very same possibility when the skeletons were first found this was the middle of the second world war and it had long been feared the japanese might try and invade india through the mountains to the north leading british authorities to wonder whether the bodies belong to some kind of elite strike force at the sharp end of a full-scale land invasion but closer examination of the bones showed this explanation couldn't have been correct whilst the skeletons looked relatively fresh at first glance thanks to the appearance of soft tissues and hair radiocarbon dating analysis suggested the bones were in fact at least 500 years old with any flesh remaining having been naturally preserved by the frigid temperatures and bone-dry atmosphere of the himalayan peaks as you'll know if you've watched my recent video on the mummies of sicily and the corpse that blinks dear old mummy nature has a bit of a mummification fetish so if not japanese soldiers who were these people and how did so many of them end up in roopkund lake the truth was nobody knew for sure though there were plenty of theories floating around mass suicide an ancient battle a mass grave from some forgotten epidemic or simply the victims of exposure to the harsh mountain conditions for more than 50 years nobody was able to provide convincing evidence to either prove or disprove these various theories but that changed in the early 2000s when a research team from national geographic visited roopkund lake to study the remains more closely their findings quickly ruled out many of the earlier theories despite those strange skull fractures that appeared to have been caused by some kind of blunt object the skeletons showed no other signs of the kinds of wounds you'd expect to see from a battle so that theory was out in fact it seemed extremely unlikely these people could have been soldiers at all because there were many women and children amongst the dead and only a single weapon was ever found at the site an iron spearhead instead of tools of war the national geographic team recovered artifacts including bangles rings wooden parasols and leather slippers and i don't ever remember reading about the great leather slipper skirmish the epidemic theory seemed equally unlikely because analysis of the bones suggested their owners were in perfectly good health before they died exposure was possible the shifting weather conditions and extreme altitude of the himalayas makes them a dangerous place even with today's modern equipment but that didn't explain the skull fractures that seemed to point to a more violent death and they were not of the self-inflicted variety as would have been the case had this been the site of a mass suicide another question that remained unanswered was what so many people were doing 5 000 meters up in the mountains in the first place rupakund lake is a good five days hike from human habitation and whilst it's popular with trekkers today that's mostly because it's full of hundreds of skeletons what exactly the owners of those skeletons were doing up there was at least at first unclear but it turned out there was a pretty good reason for lots of people to be wandering around in that exact spot high up in the himalayas the nanda devi raj jat perhaps the longest and most dangerous pilgrimage in india which just so happens to pass right by roopkund lake all of a sudden pieces of the puzzle began slotting into place pilgrims on the nanda devi raj chat are known to carry bangles and parasols similar to those recovered at the lake and large groups are often accompanied by porters carrying heavy loads using a tump line a strap that goes across the forehead prolonged use of top lines has been shown to cause groovings in the skull just like those found on some of the rub-cunned lake remains the pilgrimage hypothesis was suddenly looking very good but it only explained why these people were in the mountains in the first place not what killed them so any ideas we have hundreds of dead pilgrims in a mountain lake who appear to have died thanks to blunt force trauma caused by some kind of rounded object but those wounds are only found on the tops of the victim's skulls and there are no other signs of injury or illness it's a bit like a jonathan creek india special isn't it anyway the conclusion that nat geo researchers came to was kind of ingenious and if you've worked it out by now congratulations you're kind of ingenious too if you still aren't sure perhaps these final two clues will help first this particular region of the himalayas is known for its extreme weather and second roopkund lake is in a very exposed spot free from trees or any kind of high vegetation that could provide shelter if you happen to need it in a hurry that's right our poor pilgrims were caught in a giant hailstorm of biblical proportions in which cricket's ball-sized solid ice batted them to death in their hundreds and remarkably it seems that a local legend retold through song might be a kind of folk memory preserving the history of that very same event according to the story which is still told by locals to this day to explain the mystery of the lake nanda devi a manifestation of the goddess parvati was treated poorly by the king and queen of a land she visited long ago so she cursed their entire country turning the milk sour and infesting their rice doors with maggots by way of apology the king and queen embarked on a pilgrimage in honour of the goddess but it seems the king was worried this little mountain jaunt was going to be kind of boring because he brought along some entertainment in the form of dancing girls and concubines the ancient indian version of boats and hoes unsurprisingly nanda devi wasn't best pleased with this show of impudence and so according to the story she struck the pilgrims down with hail stones hard as iron as they crossed a ridge high above lake ruptures that story is an incredible fit with the evidence gathered by the national geographic team and it's believed a legend probably grew out of tales told by survivors of the real life tragedy centuries ago so there you have it the strange case of the skeletons in the lake had finally been solved once and for all or at least that's what people thought that's right it's plot twist time you see in 2019 another research team made a trek up to reapecond lake to carry out further analysis on the bones they took samples from 39 different skeletons and sent them to labs around the world to be tested what's these tests uncovered changed almost everything we thought we knew about what happened at rubicond i mentioned earlier that radiocarbon dating had estimated the bones were at least 500 years old but that first analysis was carried out in 1956 when radiocarbon dating as a technology was still in its infancy it had been invented just 10 years prior with the technique long since perfected the 2019 study was able to date the bones far more accurately and what they found blew the whole single catastrophic hailstorm theory right out of the water for the hailstorm hypothesis to hold true all the bones should have been exactly the same age but they weren't not even close the oldest bones in the lake were more than a thousand years older than the most recent ones and things only got weirder from there analysis reveals the existence of two main genetic groups amongst the dead the first making up the older remains and dating back to around 800 a.d were of south asian origin which makes sense roopkund lake is in the south of asia after all but the second group dating to the 19th century seemed to be made up of individuals from the east mediterranean possibly crete it was a baffling discovery but at first the researchers were optimistic its very weirdness would help them shed some light on the whole strange mystery after all if a large group of people from the mediterranean had gone missing in the himalayas in the last couple of hundred years there should be some record of it right a bunch of people from another continent showing up in a remote part of the himalayas would have been big news in those days especially if they'd all suddenly disappeared but despite extensive efforts to find information about such a group in either historical records or by speaking to locals living in the villages dotted around rupunde there was nothing no reports no sightings just nothing to say this new information muddied the skeleton-infested waters would be a major understatement considering the diversity of the people themselves and the times they died it's pretty much impossible to come up with a single neat solution that explains all the evidence it still seems reasonable to believe some were killed in a catastrophic hailstorm there are those head injuries after all and the matching folk story but with the far more accurate dates now available to us it seems even the older bones show signs of having been deposited across three or four different events suggesting there's way more to this story one giant hailstorm killing a large group of people is plausible four in the space of a few hundred years in exactly the same spot isn't as for the bones of the mediterraneans [Music] that one is genuinely a total mystery it seems unlikely they were on a hindu pilgrimage and no trade routes have ever passed through the area tourism did exist in those days of course but it was very different from the version we're all familiar with before it went extinct last year and it's hard to imagine a large group of people from so far away would have traveled to a remote corner of india just for a lark the fact there's no record of the group is even more bizarre however the got to the lake a few researchers have suggested practitioners of foggy might have been responsible for ensuring they never left foggy was essentially ritual robbery and murder carried out in india in colonial times by roaming gangs of so-called thugs that's where we get the english word from by the way according to stories from the time thugs were pretty bad dudes who would join groups of travellers to gain their confidence before killing them and robbing their corpses the large numbers of dead and relative lack of valuables recovered from rupunde makes this an interesting theory but there is a slight stumbling block there are just no tangible connections between the foggy gangs and the skeletons in the rubicon lake for now we're back where we were when these bones were first discovered plenty of people coming up with theories as to what might have happened but none of them quite seem to fit the evidence and that's unlikely to change at least not until further research is carried out until then the real reason 800 human beings lie beneath the icy waters of a mountain lake in a remote part of the himalayas remains a truly excellent mystery thanks for watching

Channel: Thoughty2

Views: 2,542,486

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Id: yYBPdL8cjfo

Length: 18min 3sec (1083 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021