El misterio del "lago de los esqueletos" de India

The mystery of India’s ‘lake of skeletons’

En lo alto de la parte india de la cordillera del Himalaya, un lejano lago alojado en un valle nevado está cubierto de esqueletos humanos.

El lago Roopkund está a 5.029 metros sobre el nivel del mar, en la parte inferior de una ladera empinada en Trisul, una de las montañas más altas de India, en el estado de Uttarakhand.

Los restos humanos están esparcidos sobre y bajo el hielo en el "lago de los esqueletos", descubierto por una patrulla británica en 1942. Antropólogos y otros científicos llevan estudiándolos más de medio siglo.

El lago ha atraído a investigadores curiosos y visitantes durante años. Dependiendo de la estación, el lago, que se mantiene congelado la mayor parte del año, se expande o encoge.

Solo cuando la nieve se derrite son visibles los esqueletos, algunos con carne todavía bien conservada. Hasta la fecha se han encontrado aquí los restos óseos de entre 600 y 800 individuos. El gobierno indio lo promociona en los folletos turísticos como el "lago del misterio".

Distintas teorías

Una vieja teoría asocia los restos con un rey indio, su esposa y sus asistentes, todos muertos en una ventisca hace unos 870 años.

Otra hipótesis sugiere que algunos de los restos pertenecen a soldados indios que intentaron invadir el Tíbet en 1841 y fueron rechazados. Más de 70 de ellos se vieron obligados a encontrar un camino de vuelta a casa a través del Himalaya y sucumbieron en el viaje.

Y una tercera sugiere que esto pudo ser un "cementerio" donde se enterraron las víctimas de una epidemia. Por Soutik Biswas

ENGLISH

High in the Indian Himalayas, a remote lake nestled in a snowy valley is strewn with hundreds of human skeletons.

Roopkund Lake is located 5,029 metres (16,500ft) above sea level at the bottom of a steep slope on Trisul, one of

India's highest mountains, in the state of Uttarakhand.

The remains are strewn around and beneath the ice at the "lake of skeletons", discovered by a patrolling British forest ranger in 1942.

Depending on the season and weather, the lake, which remains frozen for most of the year, expands and shrinks. Only when the snow melts are the skeletons visible, sometimes with flesh attached and well preserved. To date, the skeletal remains of an estimated 600-800 people have been found here. In tourism promotions, the local government describes it as a "mystery lake".

For more than half-a-century anthropologists and scientists have studied the remains and puzzled over a host of questions.

Who were these people? When did they die? How did they die? Where did they come from?

One old theory associates the remains to an Indian king, his wife and their attendants, all of whom perished in a blizzard some 870 years ago.

Another suggests that some of the remains are of Indian soldiers who tried to invade Tibet in 1841, and were beaten back. More than 70 of them were then forced to find their way home over the Himalayas and died on the way.

Yet another assumes that this could have been a "cemetery" where victims of an epidemic were buried. In villages in the area, there's a popular folk song that talks about how Goddess Nanda Devi created a hail storm "as hard as iron" which killed people winding their way past the lake. India's secondhighest mountain, Nanda Devi, is revered as a goddess.

Earlier studies of skeletons have found that most of the people who died were tall - "more than average stature". Most of them were middle-aged adults, aged between 35 and 40. There were no babies or children. Some of them were elderly women. All were of reasonably good health.

They found that the dead were both genetically diverse and their deaths were separated in time by as much as 1,000 years.

"It upends any explanations that involved a single catastrophic event that lead to their deaths," Eadaoin Harney, the lead author of the study, and a doctoral student at Harvard University, told me. "It is still not clear what happened at Roopkund Lake, but we can now be certain that the deaths of these individuals cannot be explained by a single event."

But more interestingly, the genetics study found the dead comprised a diverse people: one group of people had genetics similar to present-day people who live in South Asia, while the other "closely related" to people living in present-day Europe, particularly those living in the Greek island of Crete.