India lake bottom hidden 800 skeletons

In the Himalayas under the northern remote areas of India, hiding a glacial lake only one-seventh the size of the court, called Lupkon Lake, Lupkon Lake is irregularly round, only less than 40 meters in diameter, the deepest place is only 3 meters. The lake is in a frozen state most of the year, only in the spring and summer, there will be a few weeks of brief melting, this time the clear bottom of the lake will emerge a large number of skeletons, these skeletons do not belong to any animal, all are human skeletons, Lupu Kang Lake then fame, known as the skeleton lake.

In 1942, India is still a British colony, the Japanese forces have launched a breakthrough offensive in Southeast Asia, the war has once spread to the Sino-Indian border, northern India 5 km above sea level on the edge of the Himalayas, a British patrol squad is patrolling here to prevent the Japanese invasion, a patrolman called Harlem in passing the Luzon Lake, inadvertently glanced at the clear calm lake, and was stunned by the scene in the lake, with hundreds of human leg bones, ribs, and finger joints floating in the water, and many broken bones scattered on the rocky shore of the lake.

Harry immediately to the British authorities who hired him to report, so a series of mysterious mysteries to be solved with the skeletons surfaced. Who were they? Where did they come from? What have they been through?

In 1956, a group of anthropologists formed a survey mission to Skull Lake to investigate, the results showed that at least 300 human skeletons were located at the bottom and around this small isolated lake, and they found that many of the skeletons on the skin and soft tissue has not been completely decomposed, which means that the owner of these bones may not be long dead, in the investigation and research also found that a part of the skull is There are strange phenomena, the top of the forehead has some sunken shallow grooves, it looks as if it was subjected to wear and tear, there is a part of the bones show more serious injuries, the form of fractures like trauma caused by a blunt object, looks like it should be some kind of large round object, directly from above and caused by the impact.

Based on this combination of evidence, the British believe that it is likely that the Japanese who crossed China and tried to invade India through the northern Himalayas were Japanese soldiers who were taken out by the garrison while crossing the border and left their bones piled up here. Although a more reasonable possibility exists for this conclusion, radiocarbon dating analysis of the soft tissues and hair on the bones by Oxford University indicates that the bones have been here for at least 850 years and that the fresh-looking, uncompounded soft tissues are the result of the high altitude and natural preservation by the cold and dry climate.

So many other inferences arose, some believed that ancient skirmishes took place here, others that some people committed mass suicide here, for some reason, and others that it was a mass grave for victims of a massive epidemic, until September 23, 2019, when a team of researchers from Harvard Medical School published a new study in which researchers in the lake's numerous remains in which 76 bone samples were collected. This included 72 long bone samples and four tooth samples, and successfully generated whole-genome DNA for 38 of these individuals, while radiocarbon dating was performed on bone powder from 37 of the samples.

The results indicated that the skeletons were from around 800 to 1800 AD and that the individuals came from different regions and had different lineages. DNA identification of the samples showed that they contained three different genetic groups. The samples contained 23 males and 15 females, of which 23 individuals were of South Asian origin, i.e., similar to the current Indian population. These individuals died around 800 AD, and there is evidence that they did not arrive at Skull Lake all at once. Another 14 individuals are of Eastern Mediterranean origin, and one individual is of East Asian Chinese Han Chinese origin, and their deaths date back to around 1800 AD.

The researchers also performed an isotopic analysis of carbon and nitrogen in bone collagen in 45 individuals, and the results were eerie. The chemical composition of our bones is affected by dietary habits, and conversely, the isotopic ratios of carbon and nitrogen contained in bones can tell us about a person's dietary habits. Simply put, the ratios of carbon 13 and carbon 12 in bones can reflect what a person ate in which plants were eaten in the last decade of life. And the ratio of nitrogen 14 and 15 can reflect which kind of meat the person ate, so according to the isotopic determination of carbon, it was found that 23 individuals with South Asian ancestry had completely different dietary habits, which means that these people from India proper, their ancestry is also very diverse, not a single group of people from a place within India, but people from all over the subcontinent.

And 14 samples with Eastern Mediterranean ancestry show that these 14 people came from the Greek island of Crete, but these remains have no genetic family ties at all, and there are no records in the historical record of any Cretan inhabitants living in the Himalayas, so why would their remains appear in such a distant place?

When researchers analyzed the chemical composition of their bones, the results were even more mind-boggling. According to the isotopic determination of nitrogen in their bones, it was found that the Mediterranean people rarely ate seafood or fish in the last 5 to 10 years, which is extremely unconventional, and each of their genetic sequencings is unrelated to others, which means that these people with Mediterranean ancestry, yet Unrelated people, they may be in the form of similar independent communities, once lived inland areas, or even in the Himalayan region near once lived for a long time, while eventually went to the Himalayas of the Skeleton Lake, in its vicinity to die, they are going to participate in the pilgrimage, or for other reasons and attracted to the Skeleton Lake, which became a real mystery.

According to the characteristics of these samples' ethnically diverse look, it seems to be more in line with the characteristics of trade areas or transnational trade. But with the harsh geographical environment in which Skull Lake is located, there is no trade value at all. With high mountains, extreme climate, and not on the Silk Road, this inference is obviously completely unreasonable, which has once again brought archaeologists' research to a deadlock.

To this day, the mystery behind Skull Lake still prevails, more and more people come here, it has become a tourist destination, and the Indian government rarely takes any measures to protect the integrity of the crime scene. Many tourists come here and mischievously pile up the bones as makeshift altars, and an increasing number even take them home as souvenirs. The study suggests that if this continues, the skeletons in Skull Lake may gradually disappear in the coming years, making it more difficult for researchers to follow up on them. The skeletons in the lake come from different races, living in completely different historical times and unique cultural backgrounds, these poor people across the millennia, traveled to the mountains to come here, but eventually died similarly at different points in time in the same place, for behind the secret of what is hidden, no one knows.