In response, an enraged Nanda Devi struck the group down with вЂњiron ballsвЂќ thrown from the sky. The victims were also healthy when they died, which rules out a mass epidemic.Д«ut what if a local folk song memorializes how the victims died? The song describes a royal procession during the Raj Jat-a pilgrimage held in the region every 12 years to worship the goddess Nanda Devi-that defiled the holy landscape with dancing girls. Death by battle is unlikely: The remains belong to both men and women, and no weapons or signs of combat violence have been found. The peopleвЂ™s cause of death has remained elusive. In the 1950s, one explorer described the site to an Indian radio station as a вЂњghastly scene that made us catch our breath.вЂќ And for decades, many scholars have tried to figure out who the men and women at Roopkund were and when they died. RoopkundвЂ™s strangeness unnerves even professionals. вЂњWe have tried to answer all possible sources of genetic ancestries of Roopkund skeletons but failed to answer why Mediterranean people were traveling to this lake and what they were doing here,вЂќ writes study co-author Niraj Rai, an archaeogeneticist at the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences in Lucknow, India, in an email. Why was a Mediterranean group at Roopkund, and how did they meet their end? Researchers donвЂ™t know and arenвЂ™t speculating. (An additional individual, who died at the same time as the Mediterranean group, had east Asian ancestry.) None of the tested individuals were related to each other, and additional isotopic studies confirm that the South Asian and Mediterranean groups ate different diets. And unlike the earlier South Asian skeletons, the later group at Roopkund had a genetic ancestry tied to the Mediterranean-Greece and Crete, to be exact.

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