The Mystery of the Skeletons of Roopkund Lake
43:59 Share

- What's up? It's me, Don Toliver. If I could describe the open earbud, I would describe it as very seamless. It's like you clip it onto your ear and then sometimes you can forget it's there, but it's not going anywhere 'cause it's like clipped. It's kind of crazy.

If I could bring my music with me wherever I go, it would just make life easier and seamless without interruption. To be able to have the music on hand like that without any interruptions would be great. Check out Bose.com for more. Hey, what if I told you that you could switch your business software to an interconnected suite of programs that's more efficient and simpler than what you're using and would cost a fraction of what you're spending? You might think, oh, wow. But

But you should think Odoo. Odoo is that suite of software I'm talking about with all the business software you need from CRM to sales to HR on one platform. Discover how Odoo can take your business to the next level by visiting Odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. ♪

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and it's just us for now, but Jerry says she's going to be coming in sooner or later, and this is stuff you should know. Yeah, Jerry will come in probably in our most intense point when we're talking to each other, and you guys won't hear this, but we'll hear like just full Jerry.

Full volume. We'll hear ourselves echoing because Jerry doesn't like headphones. You guys recording? What's going on? So, yeah, when that point comes, we'll probably edit it out. Who knows? Even if we don't want to edit it out, Jerry might anyway. I saw Jerry yesterday. You know, our daughters go to school together now, which the public at large doesn't know, which is kind of fun. And I saw her at pickup for the first time this year.

What kind of pickup does she have? S10. Oh, really? That's a... No, she has a Cybertruck. Right. That's our Jerry, Cybertruck and visor sunglasses. No, not at the pickup, but at, you know, kid pickup. I got you. I got you. Yeah. It's fun. It could have gone either way, and I went the wrong way. Yeah. So speaking of Jerry, Chuck, there's a lake high up in the Indian Himalayas.

It is extremely remote. It's extremely high up. And it's part of a mountain called Trisul, one of the highest mountains in India. And this lake is in a very desolate, very remote area. Essentially, if you look at a picture of it, did you see that picture?

Heck yeah. It's nuts. It's a lake that's at the edge of a cliff at the bottom of another cliff way high above, like a ridge. Just looking at that picture, I'm like, I would fall off there so hard. I would definitely die there. And it turns out that if I did die there, it would be part of a longstanding tradition.

That's right. You were speaking of Roopkund Lake, R-O-O-P-K-U-N-D. You mentioned it's high. It's about three times as high as Denver, Colorado. Yeah. You mentioned remote and you mentioned being in good company if you died there because Roopkund Lake is well known for being the lake of bones. Yeah. Apparently, locally, it's called Skeleton Lake. Yeah.

And like I said, it's remote. The nearest village is a village called Wan. It's a group of traditional houses, I read, and it's about it. And the people who live there apparently take it upon themselves to help out strangers and travelers who find themselves in a bad way, which is pretty nice. But Wan is only 19 miles down, about 30 kilometers in the valley below Roopkund, which, I mean, 19 miles, that's a little bit of a far piece. But...

It takes three to five days to get from Juan to Lake Roopkund because the path is just so treacherous up the mountain. Yeah, it is tough to get there. And again, that three times higher than Denver, the altitude is rough. Yeah.

Rootkin technically is called a tarn, which is an old Norse word for pool. But it's a glacial lake. And if you've ever been to a glacial lake like I have, and maybe you have, have you ever been to a glacial lake? I haven't.

They're beautiful. They're really, really clear. That water you can most times see right down to the bottom of that lake. You wouldn't have to look far in this case because this is a pretty small one, only about 10 feet deep. At its widest point, it's about 130 feet wide. And save August and September, that thing is basically frozen solid. And all of those, which is kind of great in a way as far as an archaeological site goes, because all of the skeletons are

are really well preserved because they're frozen, you know, 10 twelfths of the year. 10 twelfths? Yeah, 10 twelfths. You nailed it. Five-sixths? Yeah, exactly. Two and a half thirds. Oh, boy. So when that snow and ice melts, though, those skeletons, like you said, are revealed. And it's not like there's a couple of skeletons laying around. They've estimated, and these are scientists and researchers who've studied this area, that

that there's up to 800 individual skeletons in this tiny little lake and scattered around the shores of the lake.

It's a lot, a lot of dead people. And no one knows who these people are or how they got there. It's a genuine historic mystery. One of my favorite historic mysteries of all time. It's the mystery of the skeletons at Roopkin Lake. Yeah.

Where did you hear about this first? It was a New Yorker article by Douglas Preston that I went back and reread. I'm like, man, this is so good. It's called Skeletons at the Lake. And he goes off on a bunch of other tangents, too. It gets really into evolutionary genetics and all that because that's applied to this particular topic. But he discourses on it way, way more deeply. It's a really cool article. It's definitely worth reading.

Awesome. So this has been one of the great natural mysteries since 1942 when a gentleman named H.K. Madhwal, who was a forest official from India, was sent there to gather some Himalayan flowers for research and study. And he was like, oh, my God, look at the bones. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. As you as you would say.

And reported over, you know, the course of a few years because, again, you can only, you know, these things only thaw out for a couple of months over the years. So any kind of study over the years, and as you'll see, there's been a lot since the 1950s once scientists got involved. Because they kind of kept it a secret or at least kept it quiet in India for a little while. And eventually when they announced it in the 1950s, of course, science got on board.

But they've got a pretty narrow window to go and actually collect and study this stuff, like I mentioned, between August and September generally. And it seems like 1956, a couple of weeks in September there, was when a lot of that initial collection took place, right? Yeah, there were three different expeditions that arrived at the lake in a two-week period in September 1956.

And I saw that I guess some of them were unsuccessful, but at least one gathered some artifacts and some remains and took them back to the Anthropological Survey of India in Kolkata, which used to be called Calcutta. What did they find?

They found dozens of leather slippers. Okay. The remains of parasols made of bamboo and birch. Fancy. They found a lot of rings. They found the remnants of some musical instruments. Did the party. Yeah. And then really importantly, crucially, as we'll find, bangles, like those bracelets that your grandmother who really loves gin wears that clink around all the time. Not Susanna Hoffs.

Is she from... Oh, no. From the Bengals. That's right. Nice. Yeah. Nope. Or Jane...

Whelan? No, she was from the Go-Go's, right? Oh, yeah. That's who I'm thinking of. Sorry, Go-Go's and Bengals. She's a fun follow on Instagram, by the way. Okay. Good to know. She's great. So immediately, of course, science is like, all right, we got to figure this out. This is a great mystery. We got all these bones here. We don't know who these people are. So some theories emerged.

And we're going to go over the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 theories and then bust them apart right after that. The first of which is perhaps these were soldiers from India who may have been trying to get into Tibet or flee Tibet over the centuries. They kind of narrowed it down to one campaign between May and June of 1841, which was repelled

And they say this may have been it like they were trying to get into Tibet. They were repelled they got the heck out of there and then they Perished like a storm caught them or something and they died here by this lake. Yeah, because here's the thing you have to account for a big group of people who all died Simultaneously it seems around this lake, right? So, uh

like a big troop of soldiers would certainly fit that bill. And then another kind of soldier. So when this was discovered by H.K. Modwall in 1942, World War II was in full swing. And as far as I know,

The India was still administered by the British government. So the people running the show in India, the Brits running the show in India, were really concerned about a land invasion of India by the Japanese in particular. So they worried that what they had stumbled upon was a non-successful Japanese invasion of India, which I think is one of the reasons why they kept it quiet for years. OK. Well, that makes perfect sense, actually. Sure. Because I wondered about that.

uh another theory that popped up was maybe these were just traders they were tibetans on the silk road maybe another trade route that we don't know about yet yeah uh or maybe they were just villagers who lived nearby and died of an epidemic and they you know if you die of some nasty plague or disease you don't bury everybody right there where you're living you kind of take them away a bit and maybe that's what that was right

Another theory is, well, there's a bunch of different spots, sacred spots around India where you would ritually take your own life, either out of self-sacrifice or as an act of devotion to one of the Hindu gods. And they're like, well, maybe Roopkan Lake is one of these lesser known spots for ritual suicide. And that's what happened to all these people.

Yeah, that's a pretty good one. What else? There's another one that's pretty low-hanging fruit, but it makes a lot of sense. Somebody spoke up and said, guys, what if it's just a cemetery? Yeah. That would explain all the dead people, don't you think? And everyone was like, oh, God, Phil. Jesus, every time. Yeah, you get us every time, Phil. You can really see through the clutter. You know what Phil's nickname is? What?

low-hanging fruit Phil that's a great name and then finally after everyone you know kicked Phil out of the office and told him to go get everyone coffee they said Phil's kind of on to something but also what if it's not like a cemetery per se but it was just people it's now a cemetery because they were victims of a landslide or something and that's just where they are now yeah it's possible

So the problem is, is that none of these theories really fully fit the evidence that they found at the lake so far. Right? Yeah. Soldiers, whether they're Japanese, Indian, or any kind, they don't make any sense because none of the artifacts recovered at the lake were weapons. They found a single spearhead made of iron. But of all the artifacts they found, that was the only thing.

thing that could remotely be used as a weapon at the lake. So if there's a bunch of soldiers there that died suddenly, their weapons wouldn't have evaporated over time. You'd find something. And then similarly, the Japanese soldiers in particular, that theory held zero water because there had been an earlier unofficial sighting by a British climber named T.G. Longstuff, if you can

Can believe that. Yeah. He saw them first in 1907 as far as Europeans go. And so they couldn't possibly have been there because of World War Two. That reminds me of the old joke from Rodney Dangerfield and back to school. Would you come over and help me straighten out my long fellow? Yeah, man. What a great movie. Yeah. I haven't seen that in a long time. I saw that in the theaters. Did you really? I totally did.

I don't know if I would have been allowed to. Is that rated R? That probably wasn't rated R, was it? I could see it rated R. My mom took me, if I'm not mistaken. Oh, that's sweet. Yeah. I love it. The triple Lindy. Thanks, Mom. Yeah. Oh, there's one other thing that kind of rules out an idea because of the lack of weapons. One of the other theories is that this is a group of victims of some sort of attack. Somebody raised the idea of the thuggies.

You remember them, the secret cult of bandits in India that may or may not have existed like Jerry. But they're like, no, somebody would have dropped their weapons way more than just one iron spear had these people been victims of murder. So the soldiers, the violence at the hands of other humans, that just doesn't really hold up.

Doesn't hold up. Silk Road Trader, first of all, was not along the Silk Road. That was pretty easy to rule out. Big one. But then they were, you know, of course, they earlier had said, yeah, but maybe it's something like the Silk Road, just a trade route we didn't know about. They looked and looked. They couldn't find any traces of a trade route where they were. And also it was

Again, so rural, so high up there. They just don't think that was a likely candidate to be any kind of normal route. Yeah. The trader's theory was proposed by the other Phil, Fact Phil, because anytime you open his mouth, everybody would say, Fact Phil, come on. Yeah. Can we get away with fact these days?

I think so. Things have gotten way more risque. All the kids sing about being high all the time. That's true. What else, man? Well, the epidemic one sounded pretty good to me, but they actually can examine...

those bones forensically and you know kind of tell whether that's true or not pretty uh deaf definitively so they did that they were like no everyone here seemed like they were doing pretty well yeah uh no signs of disease um so that also kind of rules out the cemetery and burial ground along with the fact that there were no um there were no babies there there were no children's remains found if it was a cemetery you'd probably find some of that stuff

Yeah. So I saw both. A lot of people very confidently say that there were babies and children found. Oh, really? Yes. I also saw that other people said there are no babies or children found. So I'm not that's not definitive. I'm not 100 percent certain. But just the fact that these people, their age range was like 18 to 35 and there weren't any very old people at least found among the remains.

It suggests that it wasn't a cemetery, too. So the idea is, like, none of these initial theories panned out. They all got shot down, boop, boop, boop, one after the other. Ha!

But we're still left with this huge question, a cliffhanger question, if you ask me. What is the reason that these skeletons ended up, as many as 800 dead people, at this tiny little lake, 16,500 feet, more than 5,000 meters in the Indian Himalayans? Should we take a break or are you just setting me up for something? Let's take a break. All right. We'll be right back.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with.

His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.

At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. ♪

So, Chuck, I don't remember what episode it was in, but we've talked about geoarchaeological mythological study. There was another...

another term for it that was less clumsy, but essentially it's taking local legends, especially very old local legends, especially among indigenous people and assuming that there's some kernel of truth that, you know, the, the earth opening up and swallowing everybody in a village might've been some huge earthquake that, you know, a fault line opened at some point. And then they use that and try to figure out what specific event,

this mythology is talking about. Well, it just so happens that there's a local legend among the people who live around the Roopkund Lake area that hundreds and hundreds of years ago, there was a traveling group of people who were struck down because the goddess Nanda Devi was very unhappy with the way that they were celebrating her or showing their devotion to her on a longstanding pilgrimage

to honor Nanda Devi.

Yeah, so this is a pilgrimage that would be undertaken every dozen years to, again, to honor that God you spoke of, Nanda Devi, who is, we should say in this case, a manifestation as a mountain from the goddess Parvati, very big goddess in the Hindu pantheon, and the goddess of, like, a good goddess, goddess of, like, great things, love, marriage, devotion, beauty, like, all the goodness and kind of lovey things.

That's funny. I noticed you left out fertility and children. Yeah, that's not the goodness. So, Pavarti, again, can embody a lot of different forms. In this case, it was a mountain.

And so this pilgrimage would take place every 12 years. And Roopkund is on that route, one of 19 stops. And the last stop on the way to the final destination, which is, what is it, a mountain called Hamkund. Well, it's another glacial lake on the other side of that really treacherous cliff that's above Roopkund.

Okay, so this is the final lake or the penultimate lake before the final lake. Right. And so this pilgrimage, like this exists. There's one coming up in 2026 where people who just haven't undertaken it before travel this incredibly dangerous. They consider it's the most dangerous pilgrimage in the Hindu religion. And a lot of them, sure, a lot of them do it barefoot over the course of about three weeks. Right.

And when they get to Roopkund, the second to last stop, and they continue on up this very treacherous, scary ridge, bear

barefoot at 16,000 feet in elevation. They go down another 1,000 feet to Hamkund, where they release a ram that they've carried with them. And then the ram is believed to carry Nanda Devi onward to the home of Lord Shiva, her consort, who lives just higher up in the mountain. And then everybody turns around and goes back down the mountain the way they came. So we know this pilgrimage actually does exist. It's

It's called the Nanda Devi Raj Yatra. And this local legend says that hundreds of years ago, a king and a queen, King Yasadwal and Queen Balampa, who were rulers of Kanaj, which is still around, they undertook this pilgrimage, but they weren't taking it seriously enough and bad things happened to them.

Well, yeah, earlier when I mentioned, like, sounds like a party with the parasols and the musical instruments and stuff, that's exactly what the theory holds, is that they brought along some singers and dancers on this pilgrimage, they were having a good time, and Nanda Devi was not too fond of this approach, did not like this atmosphere, and so rained hell upon them via giant hailstones,

and killed everybody, and that is what that large traveling party was, was people that were killed by a hailstorm as a sort of revenge from a god who didn't appreciate how this pilgrimage, the lack of solemnity for this pilgrimage. Right.

So this is a local legend. It's been around for a very long time. And when the team of archaeologists who conducted a study in 2004, I think this was the first actual like big study done on what the heck was going on at Roopkin Lake. When they looked into this local lore, they're like, actually, a lot of the evidence supports this legend.

So they started kind of really digging into it a little more, and they found that the age range, I think I said, of the people involved were between 18 and 35. So there weren't any kids, at least from what the sample they took was, and there weren't any old people. So you could say, all right, well, this is –

possibly a royal entourage that would account for it. The thing that really kind of gives that away is it was evenly split pretty much between male and female. So we know it wasn't some sort of military party because number one, weapons are missing. And number two, you would expect it to be almost exclusively male.

And then the skulls that they sampled bore signs of trauma, like massive trauma to the skulls that were unhealed, which would strongly support the idea that this person was killed by a hailstone and died basically instantly.

Yeah, that was one part of the skull. There were some other skulls, or I guess some other findings on those skulls, that showed indentations in the same place along the forehead. And if you have an assistant, a local porter, that's carrying a bunch of heavy stuff, a lot of times they'll carry things on their backs, but have a strap attached to that thing that goes around their forehead.

And if you've been doing that for long enough, like they would have been, then they might have these indentations in the same place. So everything is sort of lining up here. They also carbon dated the bones between 800 and 900 CE, which would have fit the timeline. So Phil is getting pretty excited at this point. That's right.

Right. There was another really, there's another piece of really solid circumstantial evidence that supported the legend. Remember, they found a bunch of bangles and the remains of parasols. Well, even still today, Nanda Devi Devotees, who followed the Nanda Devi Rajyotra,

The pilgrimage. I know. They travel with brightly adorned parasols and they wear bangles as part of their devotion to Nanda Devi. And again, they found a lot of parasols, a lot of bangles. So it also really strongly suggests that this was a group of pilgrims who were struck down around the time that this local legend says this king and queen's party was struck down on their pilgrimage.

All right. So you got all this evidence. It all seems to fit. There was an analysis in 2004 that I think you said that was one of the first like big studies. And a archaeologist named Tom Higgum from Oxford University said, you know what?

I think this is what happened, you guys. It all fits. And we do like to follow the lead of the local folklore because that can often yield clues or hints to a direction. And we think their direction's right. We think hailstorms happen around here in the Himalayas. It's very likely that this is probably what happened. Like,

Nearby there have been hail storms that have killed hundreds of people and thousands of livestock with extremely large hail so We think in this those were people who could have like sheltered even so they were like, all right I think this is it guys. Let's shut down the science department

Yeah, the incident you're talking about happened in 1888. It killed 230 people. And so you can imagine if these people could run for shelter and 230 of them still died, a group of hundreds of people on a pilgrimage who had no shelter would have stood zero chance to like giant hailstones that would rain down upon them. So the theory is that these people were killed in a single mass death event.

They were unlucky enough to get caught out in a sudden unexpected hailstorm, and the people in the royal party, the royal entourage, and their porters were all killed. The thing that they weren't quite clear on is whether they were all killed at the lake or higher up on the ridge that leads to Hom Koon, and then eventually their bodies were deposited by rock slides down to the lake. Not 100% clear on that, but it's...

But it didn't matter. They felt like they had solved the mystery finally of what all these skeletons were doing at Roopkund. All right. Well, let's take our second break here and we'll come back because the story is not over, you guys. And we're going to talk about what happened right after this.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with.

His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.

At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so that theory is hanging out there in 2004.

Hangs out for about 10 years. Everyone's feeling pretty good about it. The book is not closed, but the book is, you know, it's almost closed. Sure. And then in 2014, I guess it was Phil said, maybe we should take another look at these samples, everybody. This is low hanging fruit, Phil. Yeah, like things have come a long way in the 10 years in science. So maybe we could glean something. So a five year study kicked off in 2014 involving 16 labs around the world.

And they sampled bones from 38 of those individuals, sent them to all these labs and got some really, really interesting results in that out of the 38,

Twenty three belong. These are all different people. Twenty three belong to the gene pool that you would expect to find in that area. You know, some sort of South Asian ancestry. Fourteen of them had zero South Asian DNA, appeared to come from the Mediterranean. And then there was this one lone person from a third genetic group.

Maybe Han Chinese, some sort of East Asian ancestry. And they're like, who's this guy? Like, first of all, why are these people not all the same people? Right. Because we can go ahead and throw that theory out the window, the first theory, because they would have all been the same, you know, from the same ancestry.

So, like, why are they from three different groups? And why is there that one weirdo just hanging out there by himself? But also, so you could reasonably see a Han Chinese person eventually making their way over to India via Tibet. The biggest mystery was what the heck a group of people from the Mediterranean were doing all the way up in the Indian Himalayas at some point. Yeah.

Did not fit.

One of the things that they found was that the diets among the different groups were different and they actually matched the ancestry that the genetic testing had revealed. So like the people from the Mediterranean showed that they were raised on wheat and barley and rice, which fits a Mediterranean diet.

The people of South Asian ancestry showed that they had eaten a lot of millet, which fits their ancestry as well. So it was clear that these these were like these findings were true. Like this wasn't just some weird random anomaly. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

But it's it's like the mystery is just deepened at this point. Yeah They tried to find as far as the how the Mediterranean people got there. They looked at other folklore and Literature that was like can we find anything in here where they're writing about either someone from the Mediterranean or a group that was Just different and exotic and like maybe could have been Mediterranean. They basically struck out on that front so

The mystery is deeper at this point until we get to our final, I guess, greatest reveal when the study revealed that the skeletons not only were different people from different ancestry, but within those groups even, they came from different eras. Yep.

So remember I said that they were originally trying to account for a single mass death event that accounted for all of the dead people. The assumption was they'd all died at once. So not only were these mystery people from the Mediterranean part of this group, the groups of people that they studied had died a thousand years apart, as a matter of fact.

So they had separated them into three groups based on their genetic ancestry. Roopkund A were the members with South Asian ancestry, the people who you'd expect to be there. Roopkund B were the Mediterranean people. And they looked at their genetic profile and they get this. They said that the closest genetic profile around today are people who live on Crete.

which is an island south of Greece in the middle of the Mediterranean. They said, we're not saying that these people were from Crete, but that's the closest profile we can find to the people who are dead up on Rupkin Lake, right?

Yeah. Those people died in the 18th century is the best guess they have based on the carbon dating. The people from Rupkind A, they died between the 7th and the 10th centuries. And the people in that group didn't even seem to die at the same time.

That's right. But the group A that perished sometime between the 7th and 10th centuries does support, if you go back to that original local legend of King Yazdawal and Queen Balampa. Boy, I love seeing Queen Balampa. Mm-hmm.

That's a good one. It does fit with that timeline. But within that group, like you said, they seem to have died in two separate eras, separated by a couple of hundred years. So it may not have been one, you know, I guess it could have been just a smaller royal group. Yeah, that doesn't rule out and all the evidence still supports that some group from Rupkin A group was.

could have been that royal entourage that was part of the local legend. But because there was one group that died between 675 and 769 and another group from Rupkand A that died between 894 and 985 CE, they don't know who is who. They haven't been able to suss that out and maybe never will. But this mystery just keeps getting more and more bizarre. You have a group of mystery people who shouldn't be there. You have the

The fact that different separate mass death events happened at least three times over the course of a thousand years. And it's just getting weirder and weirder. So the scientists who are conducting this massive survey or study that actually ran, I think, from 2014 to 2019,

they started sending each other samples of the samples they had to make sure that like the people who had tested for what kind of diet were working from the same bones that the people who had tested what the genetic profile was of these people. And it all came back the same. Like there was no mix up with the bone powder that was sent to the different labs. They were all working from the same samples. And so these findings were correct.

It just deepened this mystery and it completely upended what had, like you said, previously been thought of as a solved mystery generally. Yeah. I love the idea of the one rando Chinese person because it sort of jibes with...

You know, with just history, how there could be one person that ends up with another group of people from another place and like kind of stays with them. Have you watched the new Shogun series? No, but didn't it just rack up at the Emmys?

It did, and previously, I don't know why it didn't get on my radar too much, but after the Emmys, I was kind of like, oh, you know what, maybe I should check this out because I love feudal Japan, and all of that stuff is just the aesthetic of it, and the story is just a part of history that I think is super cool. So I started watching it. I'm like four episodes in, and it's awesome. And the whole notion here is there's this British guy that ends up in Japan, right?

like maybe the first British guy in Japan and is sort of in a way taken in by these people. So it's those things happen in history where you would get this just kind of single person all of a sudden ends up on another side of the world because they discovered some new route with their ship. And all of a sudden they're like, all right, well, I guess I live here now. Is the British guy played by Matt Damon again?

No. Did he reprise his role? That was a different movie. No, nor was it Richard Chamberlain. Okay, so is this also based on James Clavel's Shogun? It is, yeah. It's the original story from that, but it's really, really good. If you're into that kind of thing, I think you would like it. Okay, I'll check it out. We should also say that the lone Han Chinese person made up Rubkin Group C. They had their own group.

Yeah, group of one, like Phil. Well, there's two Phils, but one's liked and the other's disliked. Actually, they're both kind of disliked, but one's really disliked, overtly. Yeah, he's definitely in his own group. So this whole thing, like this mystery is not solved. This is still ongoing. What we've described and spoken about is...

the state of the current understanding or the state of the current questions about what's going on up at Roopkund Lake or what went on. And so it leads to the question, like, are we ever going to be able to solve this? And the answer to that is there is a good possibility we will, because if you think back,

This 2014 to 19 study was working with the bone powder from just 38 individuals. Yeah. And there's as many as 800 individuals up there. So this is a really small sample. So as we start, like, analyzing more and more of the skeletons, who knows what weird data we're going to get back.

Yeah, for sure. One of the problems with research at this spot, well, there's a few, but one of them is, you know, it became, of course, a popular hiking trek for like commercial hiking trips. And over the decades, climbers would go in there and, you know, if you look up this lake and you'll definitely see bones that are arranged and like cairns and like rocks.

you know, clearly put together by the hand of a person much, much later. And so they're rearranging things, taking things with them. Yeah, a lot of them took bones. Yeah, like taking bones and looting artifacts and things like that. But what happens when you rearrange stuff like that, like a numbskull,

it takes away the context. Who knows if the original, like we don't even know what the original context would have been or if that even would have yielded anything. But we know it's not going to yield anything now because there's bones arranged, you know, like arm wrestling each other and playing football and stuff. Yeah. Like over the top. One of them's wearing leg warmers on his arm bone. Yeah. So, yeah, without context...

Without context, that means traditional archaeology is sidelined, right? They can't help out at this point. I mean, they can to an extent, but like where they really swoop in and start interpreting things correctly is with context and without context, their hands are tied largely. Right.

But luckily, as we've seen, there's molecular biology, there's evolutionary genetics, there's a lot of other tools in the toolbox, which is constantly expanding, that we can use to analyze stuff and make pretty good guesses from, you know, the bones themselves, not necessarily just how they were arranged. Because like you said, there may have never been any kind of real context.

There's a lot of rock slides in the area. There was one as recent as 2005 that revealed a new body that hadn't been found before. So it's possible that these things, these bodies were moved down the mountain over the course of a thousand years, maybe even longer. So it's possible that we wouldn't have had any context anyway. And it's not just a bunch of jerky mountains.

mountain climbers who were messing with the bones in the 10 years that you could hike past Roopkin Lake. Yeah, my money is on that first theory for some of them, that entourage, because that definitely explains a lot of the stuff, the parasols and the bangles and the musical instruments and stuff. And then I think the rock slide thing definitely plays a part because a lot of bones could have just, you know, collected down there over the centuries. I don't know.

Like this, this one doesn't seem to me like there's going to be a single definitive explanation, but a combination of explanations. Yeah, totally. I mean, there's so many ways to die up there, like not just hailstones or rock slides, but also just plain old blizzards. Getting lost in a blizzard and succumbing to the elements is really easy up there. I mean, there's just a lot of ways to die. And so, yeah, it could be group after group.

A lot of them on this pilgrimage that just died over the years in this one particular spot. It's just that dangerous. But

That still leaves the mystery of what a group of Mediterranean possibly from Crete were doing on a very, I mean, outside of Hindu, a pretty obscure pilgrimage. Like I certainly hadn't heard of it before. And I got my finger on the pulse of pilgrimages around the world and I hadn't heard of it. So how did these people from the Mediterranean in the 18th century end up on this pilgrimage? That may be a mystery forever, especially because there's no legends or folklores associated with it.

But I think a lot of the questions are going to be unlocked because luckily, since the lake itself is frozen over 10 months of the year, a lot of the bodies or skeletons or remains are preserved

at the bottom of this, this lake. Because even when it's like the lake's melted, it's really cold and you don't want to go in it. And so all it's going to take is somebody to take a really comprehensive study of the remains in the lake. And again, who knows what, what weird stuff it's going to yield. It's one to keep an eye on. And I just, I love this mystery to me.

It being answered is preferable to it remaining a mystery, which is kind of like the opposite of how a lot of unsolved mysteries are, especially historic mysteries.

Yeah, for sure. Another good thing on the hope of finding something out about this is they did, the government did shut down that route to hikers and commercial hiking. So like that's, it's not going to be disturbed by those knuckleheads anymore. No, and I'm guessing because it's a solemn occasion and the pilgrims are taking, you know, their pilgrimage seriously, they're probably not much messing with the skeletons at Roopkund among the pilgrims themselves. So,

I would think so. Now that you've done away with the commercial climbers, it's probably fairly safe now. Yeah, agreed. Okay, you got anything else about Rupkin Lake and the mystery of the skeletons there? Nothing else. I don't either. Hopefully you guys enjoyed this as much as I have. And since I said that, of course it's time for Listener Mail. This is just a very sweet, appreciative email. It's a little long, but it's a good episode for this one. Sure.

Hey guys, for the sake of brevity, I'll jump straight in. My name is Samantha. I'm from Saskatchewan in Canada and today's my 30th birthday. Earlier this year, I made a list of individuals who through their work have greatly impacted my worldview and my goal was to write to the top 30 people who have influenced my mindset and you guys are on that list. Neat. My spouse and I actually only religiously consume your content for about a month out of the entire year during our road trips.

You're the voices in our car and have been for years now. You've explained the Grand Canyon as we drive through Las Vegas, how tsunamis work, as we wind down the West Coast and how dopamine works, as we drive to Cedar Point Amusement Park. - Yeah. - It's an odd thing. I've almost come to associate your voices with my favorite weeks of the year that I look forward to. And I simply wanna say thanks.

for contributing to those memories in an indirect way. That's awesome. One comment I made, and you're about to love this part, Josh, because you look pretty good in this. Oh, okay.

Sit up. Sit up. One comment I made to my spouse during our most recent road trip to BC this summer was how you two speak to each other. The complete respect and appreciation for each other's personal moments. I can't for the life of me remember the exact details, but Chuck made some mention in one of the episodes about being able to relate to a difficult family environment when growing up. And the feedback given by Josh was in two parts. First, to thank him for sharing that.

and to apologize that he went through that as a kid, and then to go on to provide commentary and move the episode forward. That was one of the many examples of you both being stellar, wholesome human beings, and I hope the people in your life tell you this often. If your audience can see this trait during the episodes, I cannot imagine how much more compassionate and empathetic you are in everyday life. Well, maybe more so on the show, actually.

We're not that great. To leave one final sentiment, though, guys, if you ever have days where you grapple with your purpose...

Question whether what you're doing has made an impact or feel the desire to know that what you do carries meaning. Please know that you have done that for at least one person. For that, I cannot thank you enough. Samantha Kitzel. Kitzel? With a Z. Oh, really? Even better. Samantha, thank you so much for that. We can't tell you how much we appreciate you for writing that to us. That means a lot, especially the part about me.

And happy birthday. And also, hello to your spouse. And we look forward to the next road trip. Yeah. Be safe on your travels. Have fun. And yes, happy birthday. And if you want to be like Samantha and get in touch with us, you can do that. You can send it via email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother...

trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Jeremy Hobson. The election is just days away. And on The Middle Podcast, we open the phones to everyday Americans. Hi, this is Anna from Tennessee. This is Amari calling from Houston. I find it's always good to talk things out rather than bottling things up. So why not open the conversation up to our closest neighbor, Canada? They are America's biggest trading partner after all.

And even though they can't vote, our election does matter to them. So keep an ear out for a special cross-border conversation only on The Middle with Jeremy Hobson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

That was the idea where you could look in a dead person's eyes and see the last thing they saw.

That's right, in this case, a dinosaur. Listen to Stuff to Blow Your Mind on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.