Hello everyone, and welcome to Scary Interesting.
In this video, we're gonna look at three stories that happened thousands of years ago.
What's most surprising about each of them is just how much we've been able to learn
despite how long ago they occurred.
With that said, that doesn't make them any less mysterious or gruesome,
so as always, viewer discretion is strongly advised.
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You might have seen a picture that's circulated a few times since it first hit the internet in 2018.
In the picture, there's a skeleton laid flat out on the ground on its back.
Where the head of the skeleton should be, there's a giant stone block sticking almost straight up.
This picture, or the man in the picture at least,
has been dubbed "the unluckiest man of all time" or "the unluckiest man in Pompeii".
I wasn't able to get the licensing to show the picture here,
but if you want to see it, a quick Google search will get you there.
Initially, when this skeleton was found or unearthed,
it was thought that this was a man who was incredibly unlucky
and happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time as Mount Vesuvius erupted.
The volcanic explosion sent hundreds of tons of rock into the air,
and this man was struck by some of the debris, killing him where he stood,
and leaving him to be found almost 2,000 years later.
Unfortunately, although this makes for a great story,
recently, the man's skull was found intact in the vicinity,
indicating that he probably died first and then was struck by the stone after,
or that the remains moved around from their original position
and only appeared to have been hit by the stone.
At the same time, this doesn't really make what probably happened any less horrifying.
In the year 79, the city of Pompeii sat in the shadow of the 4,000-foot Mount Vesuvius,
which is a stratovolcano.
In October of that year, sometime around 1 in the afternoon,
the volcano erupted into a massive explosion.
This sent superheated clouds of gas to a height of 30 kilometers,
along with other chunks of molten rock and hot ash.
And there potentially were people who were hit by some of the initial debris
because this is known to happen; it even happened as recently as 2022 in Japan.
But that's not all. Volcanoes are notoriously loud.
In fact, the loudest ever sound in recorded history is thought to be Krakatoa in Indonesia
which was heard up to 3,000 miles away.
And for the people in the immediate vicinity, this was quite literally deafeningly loud.
Supposedly, a British ship was 40 miles from the explosion, which isn't all that close,
yet the sound was still so loud it ruptured the eardrums of half the men on board.
But the most dangerous part of all in most volcanic eruptions
are these superheated gases that take several different forms afterward.
These can either fall from the sky directly or flow down the mountainside
and destroy almost everything in their path.
By the end of the first day, a lesser-known city,
which was actually closer, named Herculaneum, was completely destroyed.
Then on the second day, Pompeii was overtaken by some of these flows
which brought toxic clouds and temperatures high enough to melt lead.
Anyone who hadn't evacuated the city would have passed away from one or both of these.
People would have been safe in their homes for a time until the temperatures rose inside there too.
This is thought to be the actual cause of death of the man dubbed "the unluckiest man in history",
and Pompeii would eventually be covered in 16 feet of rock and ash.
On a summer's day sometime between 5,100 and 5,300 years ago,
an athletic but stocky man, weighing 110 pounds with long, thinning brown hair
and dark skin, was hiding in a gully in what would later be named Ötztal Valley.
This is an area on the borders of Austria and Italy.
The man, who was later named Ötzi, was 5'5" tall, which was about average.
He had brown eyes set deep in his skull, a beard, and cheeks that had sunken with age,
and his wrinkled face made him look much older than he was at 45 years old.
Ötzi came from a long line of Anatolian farmers,
and he might have been a shepherd who lived for long periods of time in the mountains.
He also spent some of his time working with copper, either mining it or processing it for tools.
At the time, he had been travelling on foot from a valley to the south
before sitting down on a glacier and resting in the little gully.
As he sat there, he took a little snack out of his leather pack,
which was dried ibex, red deer, a prune, and a little bit of wheat.
He didn't quite finish the snack and puts them back into his pouch.
His teeth also hurt when he chewed.
Some of them were rotting, which probably made it hard to tear the strips of meat.
He also had a gap between his two front teeth where the wheat from the bread could get stuck,
but despite that, he enjoyed the little bit of nourishment.
Ötzi's clothes were just what he needed too.
He wore leather shoes lined with straw, tree bark and grass, and laced them up with cow leather.
He had goat leather leggings held up by a belt,
a sheepskin loincloth and coat, and a water and windproof cloak made from a grass weave.
On his head, he had a bearskin hat which was stitched with grasses, animal remains,
and a long woolly fibre known as bast.
He had a copper-bladed axe with a wooden handle, a flint knife,
and a small pointed tool for making holes in leather.
He also carried a bow and a quiver containing some arrows, not all of which he'd finished making.
He even had a small fire making kit with a flint and some kindling inside.
During his life, he'd walked across the mountains quite a lot
which strengthened his legs and thickened his lower bones.
But this trip was probably slower than the ones he'd been on in his younger days.
He had arthritis in his knees and ankles and degeneration of the bones at the base of his spine.
Around his body and across his chest where he'd broken two ribs
when he was younger, he had 61 tattoos,
but he didn't get them for art or for personal expression;
he had them done for medical reasons.
They were all either parallel lines or crosses in the points that gave him pain,
which is believed to have been some sort of old medical treatment.
And it wasn't just the arthritis that slowed him down.
In addition to his snack, Ötzi had eaten a couple of pieces of birch polypore,
which is a fungus known to act against parasites and microbes in the gut.
Ötzi carried lumps of this fungus on a string and likely ate pieces of them
now and then when he felt a burning sensation in his stomach.
In his digestive tract, he also had eggs from a roundworm, sometimes called a whipworm,
and they might have caused excruciating bowel movements that the fungus would have helped to relieve.
In addition to that, he also had a stomach bug known for causing ulcers called Helicobacter pylori,
and not just any string, but a powerful Asian one.
This meant that he or his people were in contact with others from distant parts of the world
through networks that traded goods, ideas, and diseases.
A few days before his final meal, something violent had happened.
Ötzi and possibly a friend had gotten into a fight or some sort of conflict.
It could have been a local fight in their village,
or it could have been a more significant battle that they were a part of,
but either way, it was a fight.
In it, Ötzi got cuts and bruises on his hands,
even splintering a bone in the crook between the thumb and index finger on his right hand.
It looks like the sort of wound you might get if you were trying to stop someone from stabbing you.
During the altercation as well, Ötzi seems to have stabbed someone in return,
maybe before or after he hurt his hands, and his friend was fatally injured.
Ötzi then had to get out of there as fast as he could,
and carried his companion over his shoulder who bled out over his cloak.
At some point, he had to leave his friend behind too,
either because he was slowing him down or because he passed away.
For the next 33 hours, Ötzi climbed up and down mountains.
Traces of fungus left behind suggest he took a zig-zag route,
playing a game of cat and mouse with whoever was coming after him.
At one point, he dropped to the bottom of a gorge, then ascended 10,000 feet
before dropping 4,000 feet again into a valley.
Once he reached the valley, he took a handful of bog moss to treat his hand,
and then turned back the way he'd come, climbing another 10,500 feet.
At some point during this chase, it looks like he managed to get one or two of the people
who were after him with his bow and arrows.
Then, when he reached a mountain, he found a gully to hide in, relax, and eat his final meal,
because in the end, it wasn't a good place to hide.
Within half an hour of eating, he felt a sharp pain in his left shoulder.
He was hit by an arrow from behind just a hundred feet away which punctured a vital artery.
Then, whoever was chasing him walked back up to him with a rock and struck him on the head,
or as Ötzi fell backward, he hit his head on a rock.
Either way, this was the final blow.
Afterward, they put Ötzi's left arm over his chest, rolled him onto his front,
and pulled the arrow shaft out, leaving their flint arrowhead
embedded in him for future archaeologists to find.
5,000 years later, on September 19th, 1991,
a couple was hiking in the Ötztal Alps and they were coming down
from the top of one of the mountains in the area when they decided to take a shortcut.
As they descended, they spotted something lying at the bottom of a gully filled with rainwater.
Then as they got closer, they realized it was the body of a person
who was partially stuck in the ice.
It also looked like a recent death so they took a picture
and then left to let the authorities know what they'd found.
Three days later on the 22nd, the body was retrieved along with an axe and a few other items.
A tissue sample was sent off shortly afterward,
and that's when it was realized what they'd discovered.
It was a man frozen in the ice and perfectly preserved for more than 5,000 years
until the planet had warmed enough for him to be found.
Since his discovery, scientists have worked for decades putting together
everything we know from how he died, right down to his last meal.
High in the Himalayan mountains of India sits a lake that contains something sinister.
The lake is only about 130 feet in diameter and 10 feet at its deepest point,
and it's called Roopkund, which is the Hindi word for "beautifully shaped lake".
Because of where it's located though, it's incredibly inhospitable for people.
At roughly 17,000 feet above sea level inside Nanda Devi National Park,
Roopkund Lake is surrounded by rock faces, glaciers, and peaks
that seem to almost guard it from outsiders.
In fact, the closest civilization to the lake is a 31-mile,
5-day trek through deep forests, steep ridgelines, and dangerous switchbacks.
If that wasn't enough, the unpredictable weather around the lake can bring anything
from whiteout blizzards to freak storms that pelt the area with softball-sized hail.
The bitter cold temperatures at that altitude also keep the lake frozen 11 months out of the year too.
It's a wonder it was even found at all, given how hostile the area is.
The modern-day discovery of Roopkund Lake is credited to a forest ranger
who was trekking through a valley high in the mountains in 1942.
In the distance, he spotted what appeared to be standing water between two steep banks
that dipped just enough to reveal a portion of the water.
After seeing a glimpse of it, he began making his way toward it,
but when he was close enough to take in a full view of the lake,
what he saw ripped the breath from his body.
Surrounding the lake were the tangled bones belonging to hundreds of human skeletons.
Even more horrifyingly, what the ranger didn't see
were the hundreds of additional skeletons beneath the lake's frozen waters.
In the more than 80 years since the discovery, estimates of how many are
in and around Roopkund Lake have ranged from as few as 300 to as many as 800.
Since then, anthropologists have worked to unravel the mystery of the skeletons,
but every new insight seems to only produce new questions.
Scientific advancements since 1942 have helped to narrow down some possibilities,
but even today, there isn't a definitive answer.
When the discovery of the skeletons was announced to the public in 1950,
a legend hat explained how the bones got there began to spread among the villages living in the valleys below.
The story tells of when Nanda Devi, who was a manifestation of the Hindu goddess Parvati,
travelled in disguise to a faraway kingdom.
When she arrived, she was treated so poorly by the king and queen
that she cursed the kingdom to eternity of droughts, storms, and maggot-infested crops.
In order to appease Nanda Devi to reverse the curse, the king and queen then left their kingdom
to make the pilgrimage to Nanda Devi's shrine in India, more than 25,000 feet above sea level.
The journey took them through the foothills of the Himalayas,
then high into the mountains, and across a ridge located above Roopkund Lake.
This particular section is so treacherous it's called the Path of Death.
Supposedly, during the trek, the king couldn't stand being without entertainment,
so he ordered a group of dancers, musicians and courtesans
to make the journey with them and keep him amused.
However, such flagrant indulgence of earthly pleasures enraged Nanda Devi.
So as the caravan made its way along the Path of Death,
Nanda Devi suddenly cast the dancers into the underworld
and some of the fierce blizzard of blinding snow, violent wind, and abnormally large hail.
And this storm caused the party to fall 10,000 feet to Roopkund Lake below.
The legend says Nanda Devi then left their skeletons there as a warning to others
of the fate that awaits those who would make a mockery of her.
Anthropologists obviously took a more scientific approach to the investigation of how the skeletons got there,
but there was no consensus among experts either.
Initially, there were going to be three main theories.
First was that the skeletons were the remains of Japanese soldiers
sent to invade India during World War II.
The next was that Tibetan traders on the Silk Road died after a virus
that reached epidemic levels spread through their convoy.
And the third theory was that the bones were the remains of holy men
who journeyed through Roopkund Lake to perform a ritual of self-sacrifice.
Forensic analysis was finally performed on the bones in 2004,
and anthropologists were able to start ruling some things out.
First, it was found that there were no weapons at the site,
and there was no evidence of battle or violence on any of the bones.
The skeletons were also from a wide age range,
but primarily of men and women between 18 and 40 years old.
All were in reasonably good health,
and genetic studies found no pathogens that would point to an ancient epidemic.
Three skulls that were examined had fractures on the crown
consistent with an impact by a blunt round object at the time of death,
but the wounds didn't seem to be caused by weapons.
This first analysis concluded that a single event
was likely the explanation for all of Roopkund Lake's skeletons.
So anthropologists theorized that this was a large group of travelers and porters
who were on a Hindu pilgrimage when they encountered a violent hail storm while crossing through the mountains.
This theory also bears a striking resemblance to the legend told by nearby villagers.
On top of that, there happens to be a traditional Hindu pilgrimage
that occurs every 12 years to the town of Homkund,
and to reach the town, travelers need to pass by Roopkund on the Path of Death.
So the mystery, it seemed, was finally solved after more than 60 years,
or at least they had a story that was consistent with all the findings.
Unfortunately, when the first ancient human genome was sequenced in 2010,
it represented a massive leap forward in how we study history,
but rather than help solve the mystery, it only seemed to further confuse things.
In 2015, after sampling bones from 38 different skeletons from the lake,
a new study produced a few very curious results.
The first was that the bones weren't even from the same time period.
Radiocarbon dating determined that there were actually two distinct groups of remains
that ended up at Roopkund Lake about a thousand years apart.
One from around the year 800, and another from about 1800.
This meant that it couldn't be a single event which only made things more confusing.
How two large separate groups died in such a remote location was even more strange and unlikely.
The second big finding from the study cleared the question of
where the people found at Roopkund Lake originated from.
In terms of heritage, the samples were sorted into three groups:
designated groups A, B, and C.
Group A included 23 of 38 samples,
all of which were found to be of typical South Asian ancestry,
but didn't appear to come from the same specific population.
All of the bones, estimated to be from around the year 800, belonged to group A2,
which anthropologists took as another indication that at least
some of the skeletons found at Roopkund Lake ended up there during a pilgrimage.
However, groups B and C were much more puzzling.
The group that died around the year 1800 was separated into these two groups.
The bones in both groups were definitely the result of the same event,
but they didn't originate from the same place.
14 samples that shared the same heritage were placed into Group B,
leaving just one sample in Group C that didn't match the heritage of either A or B.
So just as a quick recap of that in case it was confusing the first time around,
there were 38 skeletons tested, 23 of 38 were from the year 800,
and all 23 of those were South Asian; that's group A.
The remaining 15 individuals were all from the year 1800,
but there were two distinct populations who passed away during that time.
Fourteen were from one place, and there was a final person
who was completely unrelated to all of the others.
Here's where things get even more confusing.
When group B's results were compared against the genetics of different groups in India,
they were nowhere near match for any of them.
This was a bit of a stunning revelation;
it made no sense for bones to have come from anywhere but India if this was a Hindu pilgrimage.
Hinduism was scarcely practiced outside of India's borders at the time,
so it seemed impossible for any non-Indian group of people from elsewhere
to end up at Roopkund Lake as a result of some Hindu pilgrimage gone wrong.
Even more weirdly, when anthropologists compared Group B
to Eastern Mediterranean DNA, they discovered a pretty close match.
The samples seemed to match the ancestry found in the modern-day population
on the Greek island of Crete, thousands of miles away.
This was even more confusing to anthropologists.
Hinduism has grown and spread since 1800, but even today,
94% of people who practice Hinduism live in India.
Another 2% are in Nepal, and 1% in Bangladesh.
The rest are mostly spread between Africa, Southeast Asia, and England.
And as of the most recent count in 2012, only about 20,000 Hindus live in Greece;
that's 1/10,000 of a percent of the total Hindu population today.
In 1800, this number would have been much smaller still.
And on top of all of that, the one skeleton in Group C further complicated
what anthropologists thought they knew about the groups.
Group C was determined to be of South Asian ancestry
and wasn't even a remote match to any of the bones in Group A.
Scientists briefly entertained that maybe there were 3 separate events,
but radiocarbon dating of the bones indicated that the man in Group C
was with the people of Group B when he died.
This again further complicated things.
Why would a group of people from 1800 Greece be in the mountains of India?
And why was a man from the southeast with them?
Even more incredibly, these 38 samples are only a fraction of the total in the area.
There may be a further number of groups that aren't even known about.
So, this is where the mystery of Roopkund Lake stands today.
We know that there were at least two separate events, a thousand years apart,
that devastated two separate groups of people of curious origins.
In the decades since the lake was discovered,
local governments of nearby villages marketed the lake as a tourist destination.
They even coined alternative names for it like Mystery Lake
or Skeleton Lake, to further entice visitors.
This was great for local economies but devastating to the site itself,
as tourists have removed large quantities of bones for personal collections or to sell.
Many of the bones have even been moved around and piled into stacks,
degrading the site further and comprising the integrity of future studies.
On top of that, the weather, along with rockslides and avalanches have also done a number on the site.
Recent efforts by local governments have helped to turn the area into an ecotourism destination,
and officials believe that this will help preserve the site, honor the dead,
and keep alive the possibility of one day solving the mystery of Roopkund Lake.
Hello everyone. Thank you so much for watching.
If you have a story suggestion, feel free to send it to the email found in the description,
and hopefully, I will see you in the next one.