October 29, 2024 • 43 mins
One of the greatest unsolved historic mysteries is found in a lake atop a mountain glacier high up in the Indian Himalayas. The skeletons of as many as 800 people are inexplicably in and around the lake. No one knows who they are or what happened to them.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Yeah, Jerry'll come in, probably in our most intense point
when we're talking to each other, and you guys won't
to hear this, but we'll hear, like just full Jerry,
full volume.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
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 sorry pick up for
the first time this year.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
What kind of pickup does she have?
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Yeah? S ten? Oh really that's a cyber truck, right.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
That's our Jerry cyber truck and visor sunglasses.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
No, not at the pickup, but you know, kid, pick up.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
I got you, I got youa Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Fun.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
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 it's part of a
mountain called Trissol, one of the highest mountains in India.
(01:45):
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? He 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. It's
(02:05):
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 long standing tradition.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
That's right. You were speaking of Rupecund Lake RP kun D.
You mentioned it's high. It's about three times as high
as Denver, Colorado.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
You mentioned remote, and you mentioned being in good company
if you died there, because Rupken Lake is well known
for being the Lake of Bones.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Yeah. Apparently locally it's called Skeleton Lake.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
And like I said, it's remote. The nearest village is
a village called Wand. 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 are who find themselves in a
bad way, which is pretty nice. But Wan is only
(03:07):
nineteen miles down about thirty kilometers in the valley below ROOTCND,
which I mean nineteen miles. That's a little bit of
a far peace. But it takes three to five days
to get from Wand to Lake Rupken because the path
is just so treacherous up the mountain.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Yeah, it is tough to get there. And again that
three times higher than Denver. The altitude is rough. Root
Can 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
(03:49):
that water. You can most times you 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 ten feet deep at its widest points,
about one hundred and thirty feet wide, and save August
and September, that thing is basically frozen solid and all
(04:10):
of those which is kind of great in a way
as far as an archaeological site goes, because all of
the skeletons are really well preserved because they're frozen. You know,
ten twelfths of the year.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Ten twelves, Yeah, ten twelfths. You nailed it. Five six yeah,
exactly two and a half third, eh, boy. So when
that snow and I smelts, 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 studied this area, that there's up to eight
(04:47):
hundred 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.
(05:08):
It's the mystery of the skeletons at Rupken Lake.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Where did you hear about this first?
Speaker 2 (05:17):
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, gets
really into like evolutionary genetics and all that, because that's
applied to this particular topic, but he discourses on it way,
(05:38):
way more deeply. It's a really cool article. It's definitely
worth reading.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Awesome. So this has been one of the great natural
mysteries since nineteen forty two, when a gentleman named H. K. Madwall,
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,
(06:04):
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 fall out for a couple of months
over the year. So any kind of study over the years,
and as you'll see, there's been a lot since the
nineteen fifties once scientists got involved, because they kind of
kept it a secret, or at least kept it quiet
(06:26):
in India for a little while. And eventually when they
announced it in the nineteen fifties, of course science got
on board. But they've got a pretty narrow window to
go and like actually collect and study this stuff. Like
I mentioned between August and September generally, and it seems
like nineteen fifty six, a couple of weeks in September
there was when a lot of that initial collection took place. Right.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Yeah, there were three different expeditions that arrived at the
lake in a two week period in nineteen September nineteen
fifty six, 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 Kolcutta, Kolkata which used to be
called Calcutta.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
What did they find?
Speaker 2 (07:12):
They found dozens of leather slippers, okay, the remains of
parasols made of bamboo and birch, found a lot of rings,
found the remnants of some musical instruments. Yeah, and then
really importantly crucially as we'll find bengals like those bracelets
that your grandmother who really loves gin wars that clink
(07:35):
around all the time.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Not Susanna Hoffs.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Uh is she from Oh no, from the Bengals, that's right, nice? Yeah, No,
or Jane.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Wheeland. No, she was from Widows right.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Oh yeah, that's who I'm thinking. Sorry Bengals.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
She's a fun following Instagram by the way.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Okay, good to know that.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
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 one, two, three, four, five, six,
seven theories and then bust them apart right after that.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
The first of which is perhaps these were soldiers from
India who may have been trying to get into Tibet
or fleet Tibet over the centuries. They kind of narrowed
it down to one campaign between May and June of
eighteen forty one, which was repelled, and they say this
may have been it, Like they were trying to get
(08:40):
into Tibet. They were repelled, They got the heck out
of there, and then they perished, like a storm called
them or something, and they died here by this lake.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
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 like a big tree
of soldiers would certainly fit that bill, and then another
kind of soldiers. So when this was discovered by H. K.
Madwall in nineteen forty two, World War two was in
(09:10):
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 a non successful
(09:31):
Japanese invasion of India, which I think is one of
the reasons why they kept it choiet for years.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Okay, well that makes perfect sense, actually sure, because I
wondered about that. 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.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
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 ease. You don't
bear everybody right there where you're living. You kind of
take them away a bit, and maybe that's what that was.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
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 at self sacrifice or as an act
of devotion to one of the Hindu gods. And they're like, well,
maybe Ruken Lake is one of these lesser known spots
for ritual suicide, and that's what happened to all these people.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Yeah, that's a pretty good one.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
What else, there's another one that is 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.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
And everyone was like, oh God, Phil Jesus every time.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Yeah, you get us every time. Phil, you can really
see through the clutter.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
You know what Phil's nickname is, what low hanging fruit Phil?
Speaker 2 (10:56):
That's a great name.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
And then finally, after everyone you know, kicked Phil out
of the office and told him to go get everyone coffee,
they said, feels kind of onto something, but Also, what
if it's not like a cemetery per se, but it
was just people. It's now a cemetary because they were
victims of a landslide or something and that's just where
they are now.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Yeah, that'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 now, 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,
(11:40):
but of all the artifacts they found, that was the
only 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,
(12:00):
that theory held zero water because there had been an
earlier unofficial sighting by a British climber named TG Long
stuff if you can believe that, yeah, he saw them
first in nineteen oh seven as far as Europeans go,
and so they couldn't possibly have been there because of
World War Two.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
That reminds me of the old joke from Rodney Dangerfield
and Back to School, when'd you come over and help
me straighten out my longfellow?
Speaker 2 (12:29):
Yeah? Man, what a great movie.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Yeah, I haven't seen that a long time.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
I saw that in the theaters.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Did you really?
Speaker 2 (12:36):
I totally did.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
I don't know if I would have been allowed to.
Is that rated R? That probably wasn't rated R? Was it?
Speaker 2 (12:43):
I could see it rated R? My mom took me
if I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
No, that's sweet. Yeah, I love it the Triple Lindy,
Thanks mom. Yeah. Oh.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
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 guilt of bandits
in India that may or may not have existed, like Jerry,
but they're like, no, somebody would have dropped their weapons
(13:16):
way more than just one iron spear. Yeah, 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.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
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 there 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
(13:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Yeah, the trader's theory was proposed by the other philm
fact Phil, because anytime he open his mouth, everybody'd take
the fact Phil. Come on, yeah, can we get away
with fact these days?
Speaker 1 (14:11):
I think so things have.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Gotten way more risque. All the kids sing about being
high all the time, that's true.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
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 death definitively. So they did that, they were like, no,
everyone here seemed like they were doing pretty well. No
signs of disease. So that also kind of rules out
(14:39):
the cemetery and burial ground along with the fact that
there were no 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.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
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 that's not definitive. I'm not
one hundred percent certain. But just the fact that these
people their age range was like eighteen to thirty five,
(15:12):
and there weren't any very old people at least found
among the remains, you suggest that it wasn't a cemetery too.
So the idea is like none of these initial theories
panned out. They all got shot down boom boom boop,
one after the other. But we're still left with this
huge question, a cliffhanger question. If you ask me, what
(15:34):
is the reason that these skeletons ended up as many
as eight hundred dead people at this tiny little lake
sixteen five hundred feet more than five thousand meters in
the Indian Himalayans.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
Should we take a break or you just setting me
up for something.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
Let's take a break, all right, we'll be right back, So, Chuck,
(16:19):
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,
(16:42):
the earth opening up and swallowing everybody in a village
might have 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's talking about. Well, it just so happens that there's
a local legend among the people who live around the
(17:02):
Rupcn 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 long standing pilgrimage to honor
(17:26):
Nanda Debi.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Yeah, so this is a pilgrimage that would be undertaken
every dozen years again to honor that god you spoke of,
Nanda Devi who was we should say, in this case
a manifestation as a mountain from the goddess Parvadi, very
big goddess and the Hindu pantheon, and the goddess of
(17:48):
like a good goddess, goddess of like great things, love, marriage, devotion, beauty,
like all the goodness and kind of levy things.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
That's funny. I noticed you left out fertility and children.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Yeah, that's not the goodness. So Pavardi again can embody
a lot of different forms. In this case, it was
a mountain. And so this pilgrimage would take place every
twelve years. And Rupkend is on that route, one of
nineteen stops and the last stop on the way to
the final destination, which is what is it a mountain
(18:23):
called ham Kund.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
Well, it's another glacial lake on the other side of
that really treacherous cliff that's above Rupken.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Okay, So this is the final lake before the penultimate lake,
before the final lake.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Right, And so this pilgrimage like this exists. There's one
coming up in twenty twenty six 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. And
(19:00):
when they get to Rupken, the second last stop, and
they continue on up this very treacherous, scary ridge barefoot
at sixteen thousand feet in elevation, they go down another
thousand feet to hom Kund, 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
(19:21):
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 called the Nanda Devi
raj Yatra. And this local legend says that hundreds of
years ago a king and a queen king yes Sadwal
(19:43):
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 happen to them.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Well, yeah, earlier when I mentioned sounds like a party
with the parasols and the musical instruments 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 Non de Debi was not too fond
of this approach, did not like this atmosphere, and so
(20:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
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 two thousand and four,
I think this was the first actual, like big study
done on what the heck was going on at Rupken Lake.
When they looked into this local lore, they're like, actually,
(20:55):
a lot of the evidence supports this legend. Yeah, So
they started kind of really digging into a little more
and they found that the age range I think I said,
of the people involved were between eighteen and thirty five.
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
(21:18):
a royal entourage. It would account for it. The thing
that really kind of gives that away is there 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
(21:39):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
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 a you know, an assistant,
a local porter, that's like 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
(22:11):
around their forehead. And if you been doing that for
long enough, like they would have been, then they might
have these you know, indentations in the same place. So
everything is sort of lining up here. They also carbon
dated the bones between eight hundred and nine hundred CE,
which would have fit the timeline. So phil is getting
pretty excited at this point.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
That's right. There was another, really there's another piece of
really solid, circumstantial evidence that supported the legend. Remember they
found a bunch of Bengals and the remains of parasols. Well,
even still today, Nanda Devi devotas who follows the Nanda
Devi Rojja Yatra, the pilgrimage, I know it's work. They
(22:53):
travel with brightly adorned parasols, and they wear bengals as
part of their devotion to Nanda Devi. And they again
they found a lot of parasols, a lot of bengals.
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
(23:14):
was struck down on their pilgrimage.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
All right, so you got all this evidence, it all
seems to fit. There was an analysis in two thousand
and four that I think you said that was one
of the first like big studies. And an archaeologist named
Tom Higghem from Oxford University said, Anna, what I think
this is what happened to you guys. It all fits,
And we do like to follow the lead of the
(23:39):
local folklore because that can often yield, you know, clues
or hents to a direction, and we think their directions 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 hailstorms that have killed hundreds of people
and thousands of livestock with dreamely large hail, so we think,
(24:03):
and 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.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
Yeah. The incident you're talking about happened in eighteen eighty
eight killed two hundred and thirty people, and so you
can imagine if these people could run for shelter and
two hundred and thirty 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
(24:33):
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
(24:55):
ridge that leads to home Kund. And then eventually their
bodies were deposited by rock slides down to the lake.
Not one hundred percent clear on that, but it didn't matter.
They felt like they had solved the mystery finally of
what all these skeletons were doing at Rupkend.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
All right, well, let's take our second break here and
we'll come back, because the story's not over, you guys,
and we're going to talk about what happened right after this.
(25:37):
Still all right, So that theory is hanging out there
in two thousand and four, hangs out for about ten 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 twenty fourteen. I guess it was Phil
(26:00):
Maybe we should take another look at these samples. Everybody fruitfill. Yeah,
Like things have come a long way in the ten
years in science, so maybe we could glean something. So
a five year study kicked off in twenty fourteen involving
sixteen labs around the world, and they sampled bones from
thirty eight of those individuals, sent them to all these
(26:21):
labs and got some really really interesting results in that
out of the thirty eight, twenty three belong these are
all different people. Twenty three belonged 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.
(26:44):
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 out of Like,
first of all, why are these people not all the
same people?
Speaker 2 (26:58):
Right?
Speaker 1 (26:59):
Because we can go ahead and throw that theory out
the window, the first theory, because they would have all
been 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.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
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 did not fit? No,
it didn't. And so these results were quite astounding, as
(27:32):
you can imagine. But you said, I think sixteen different
labs were conducting different kinds of tests, and the other
labs tests came in and supported what they had found
about the genetic makeup the ancestry of those groups. One
of the things that they found was that the diets
among the different groups were different, and they actually matched
(27:53):
the ancestry that the genetic testing had revealed. So like
the people from the mediterrane and 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
(28:16):
were like these findings were true. Like this wasn't just
some weird random anomaly.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
Yeah, for sure, but it's it's like the mystery is
just deepened at this point. Yeah, they tried to find
as far as 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
(28:46):
different and exotic, and like maybe it could have been Mediterranean.
They basically struck out on that front. So the mystery
is deeper at this point until we get to our
I guess, greatest reveal when the study revealed that the
(29:06):
skeletons not only were different people from different ancestry, but
within those groups even they came from different eras. Yep.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
So remember I said that, like they were originally trying
to account for a single mass death event that accounted
for all of the dead people that 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
(29:37):
years apart as a matter of fact, so they had
separated them into three groups based on their genetic ancestry.
Rupe and A were the members with South Asian ancestry.
The people who you'd expect to be there Roup can
be were the Mediterranean people. And they looked at their
genetic profile and they get this. They said that the
(29:58):
closest genetic profile around are people who live on Crete,
which is an island south of Greece in the middle
of the Mediterranean. They didn't they said it. 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 Rupken Lake. Right. Yeah, those people died
(30:19):
in the eighteenth century, is the best guess they have
based on the carbon dating. The people from Rupken A
they died between the seventh and the tenth centuries, and
the people in that group didn't even seem to die
at the same time.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
That's right. But the Group A that perished sometime between
the seventh and tenth centuries does support if you go
back to that original local legend of King Yazda Waal
and Queen Balampa play love seeing Queen Bolampam. That's a
good one. It does fit with that timeline. But within
(30:57):
that group, like you said, they seem to have from
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.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Yeah, that doesn't rule out, and all evidence still supports
that some group from rupkend a group could have been
that royal entourage that was part of the local legend.
But because there was one group that died between six
seventy five and seven sixty nine and another group from
rupkind A that died between eight ninety four and nine
(31:30):
eighty five. See, they like they don't know who is who,
Like 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 fact that different
separate mass death events happened at least three times over
(31:50):
the course of one 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
twenty fourteen to twenty nineteen, 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
(32:11):
diet were working from the same bones that the people
had tested what the genetic profile was of 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
(32:33):
you said, previously been thought of as a solved mystery generally.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Yeah, I love the idea of the one Randoh Chinese
person because it's sort of jibs 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
(32:59):
new show Go series?
Speaker 2 (33:01):
No, but didn't it just rack up at the Emmys?
Speaker 1 (33:04):
It did, And I previously I don't know why it
didn't like 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 like just
the aesthetic of it and the story, like it's just
a part of history that I think is super cool.
So I started watching it. I'm like four episodes in
(33:26):
and it's awesome, and you know, the whole notion here
is there's this British guy that ends up in Japan,
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
(33:47):
they discovered some new route with their ship and all
of a sudden they're like, all right, well, I guess
i'd live here now.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Is the British guy played by Matt Damon again? Did
he reprise?
Speaker 1 (34:00):
But that was a different movie. No, nor was it
Richard Chamberlain who.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Okay, so is this also based on James Clavel's Showgun.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Okay, I'll check it out. We should also say that
the lone Han Chinese person made up Group C. They
have their own.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Group, yeah, group of one like Phil.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
Well, there's two pills, but ones liked and the others disliked.
Actually they're both kind of dislike, but one's really disliked.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
Over he's definitely his own group.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
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
Rupken Lake or what went on. And so it leads
to the question like, are we ever going to be
(34:59):
able to solve this? And the answer to that is
there's a good possibility we will because if you think back,
this twenty fourteen to nineteen study was working with the
bone powder from just thirty eight individuals. Yeah, and there's
as many as eight hundred 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
(35:23):
weird data we're going to get back.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
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 trick
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 you know, clearly put
(35:49):
together by the hand of a person much much later.
And so they're they're rearranging things, taking things of them,
like like taking bones and looting artifacts and things like that.
But what happens when you when you rearrange stuff like that,
like a like a numbskull, it takes away the context.
(36:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
Yeah, like over the top, one of them's wearing legal
warmers on his armbone. Yeah, so yeah, without context a second,
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
(36:47):
and start interpreting things correctly is with context, and without context,
their hands are tied largely. But luckily, as we've seen,
there's molecular biology, there's evolutionary 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,
(37:09):
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 two thousand and five 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
(37:31):
of a thousand years, maybe even longer. Yeah, so it's
possible that we wouldn't have had any context anyway, and
it's not just a bunch of jerky mountain climbers who
were messing with the bones in the ten years that
you could hike past Rupkin Lake.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
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 bengals and the
the musical instruments and stuff. And then I think that
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
(38:14):
doesn't seem to me like there's going to be a
single definitive explanation, but a combination of explanations.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
Yeah, totally. I mean, and there's so many ways to
die up there, like not just has sailstones or rock slides,
but also just plain old blizzards. Getting lost in a
blizzard and soccumbing 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 these this pilgrimage that just died
(38:41):
over the years in this one particular spot. It's just
that dangerous. But that still leaves the mystery of what
a group of Mediterraneans, possibly from Cree, we're 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 pilgrimages around the world
(39:02):
and I hadn't heard of it. So how did these
people from the Mediterranean in the eighteenth 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 has frozen
over ten months of the year, a lot of the
(39:23):
bodies or skeletons or remains are preserved at the bottom
of 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 weird stuff it's going to yield.
(39:45):
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 actually historic mysteries.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Yeah, for sure. Another good thing on the hope of
finding something out about this is they did the government
and did shut down that route to hikers and commercial hiking,
So like that's it's not gonna be disturbed by those
knuckleheads anymore.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
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 that rupkend among
the pilgrims themselves, So I would think it's now that
you've done away with the commercial climbers, it's probably fairly
safe now.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
Yeah, I agreed.
Speaker 2 (40:37):
Okay, you got anything else about Rupken 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.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
This is just a very sweet appreciative emails. 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 thirtieth 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
(41:15):
thirty people who have influenced my mindset, and you guys
are on that list. My spouse and I actually only
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, house,
tsunamis work so you wind down the West Coast, and
(41:36):
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 want to say thanks
for contributing to those memories in an indirect way.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
That's awesome.
Speaker 1 (41:52):
One comment I made, and you're about to love this part, Josh,
because get you look pretty good in.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
This new oh Okay.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
Set up to one comment I made in my spouse
during our most recent road trip to BC this summer
was how you to speak to each other the complete
respect and appreciation for each other's personal moments. I can
it for the life and you 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
(42:21):
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,
(42:41):
I cannot imagine how much more compassionate and empathetic you
are in everyday life. Well we maybe more so on
the show. 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 desired to know that what you do carries meaning,
(43:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:20):
And happy happy birthday, and also hello to your spouse,
and we look forward to the next road trip.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
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 this, you can do that.
You can send it via email to stuff Podcasts at
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Yeah, Jerry'll come in, probably in our most intense point
when we're talking to each other, and you guys won't
to hear this, but we'll hear, like just full Jerry,
full volume.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
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 sorry pick up for
the first time this year.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
What kind of pickup does she have?
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Yeah? S ten? Oh really that's a cyber truck, right.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
That's our Jerry cyber truck and visor sunglasses.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
No, not at the pickup, but you know, kid, pick up.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
I got you, I got youa Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Fun.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
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 it's part of a
mountain called Trissol, one of the highest mountains in India.
(01:45):
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? He 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. It's
(02:05):
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 long standing tradition.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
That's right. You were speaking of Rupecund Lake RP kun D.
You mentioned it's high. It's about three times as high
as Denver, Colorado.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
You mentioned remote, and you mentioned being in good company
if you died there, because Rupken Lake is well known
for being the Lake of Bones.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Yeah. Apparently locally it's called Skeleton Lake.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
And like I said, it's remote. The nearest village is
a village called Wand. 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 are who find themselves in a
bad way, which is pretty nice. But Wan is only
(03:07):
nineteen miles down about thirty kilometers in the valley below ROOTCND,
which I mean nineteen miles. That's a little bit of
a far peace. But it takes three to five days
to get from Wand to Lake Rupken because the path
is just so treacherous up the mountain.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Yeah, it is tough to get there. And again that
three times higher than Denver. The altitude is rough. Root
Can 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
(03:49):
that water. You can most times you 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 ten feet deep at its widest points,
about one hundred and thirty feet wide, and save August
and September, that thing is basically frozen solid and all
(04:10):
of those which is kind of great in a way
as far as an archaeological site goes, because all of
the skeletons are really well preserved because they're frozen. You know,
ten twelfths of the year.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Ten twelves, Yeah, ten twelfths. You nailed it. Five six yeah,
exactly two and a half third, eh, boy. So when
that snow and I smelts, 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 studied this area, that there's up to eight
(04:47):
hundred 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.
(05:08):
It's the mystery of the skeletons at Rupken Lake.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Where did you hear about this first?
Speaker 2 (05:17):
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, gets
really into like evolutionary genetics and all that, because that's
applied to this particular topic, but he discourses on it way,
(05:38):
way more deeply. It's a really cool article. It's definitely
worth reading.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Awesome. So this has been one of the great natural
mysteries since nineteen forty two, when a gentleman named H. K. Madwall,
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,
(06:04):
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 fall out for a couple of months
over the year. So any kind of study over the years,
and as you'll see, there's been a lot since the
nineteen fifties once scientists got involved, because they kind of
kept it a secret, or at least kept it quiet
(06:26):
in India for a little while. And eventually when they
announced it in the nineteen fifties, of course science got
on board. But they've got a pretty narrow window to
go and like actually collect and study this stuff. Like
I mentioned between August and September generally, and it seems
like nineteen fifty six, a couple of weeks in September
there was when a lot of that initial collection took place. Right.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Yeah, there were three different expeditions that arrived at the
lake in a two week period in nineteen September nineteen
fifty six, 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 Kolcutta, Kolkata which used to be
called Calcutta.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
What did they find?
Speaker 2 (07:12):
They found dozens of leather slippers, okay, the remains of
parasols made of bamboo and birch, found a lot of rings,
found the remnants of some musical instruments. Yeah, and then
really importantly crucially as we'll find bengals like those bracelets
that your grandmother who really loves gin wars that clink
(07:35):
around all the time.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Not Susanna Hoffs.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Uh is she from Oh no, from the Bengals, that's right, nice? Yeah, No,
or Jane.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Wheeland. No, she was from Widows right.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Oh yeah, that's who I'm thinking. Sorry Bengals.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
She's a fun following Instagram by the way.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Okay, good to know that.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
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 one, two, three, four, five, six,
seven theories and then bust them apart right after that.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
The first of which is perhaps these were soldiers from
India who may have been trying to get into Tibet
or fleet Tibet over the centuries. They kind of narrowed
it down to one campaign between May and June of
eighteen forty one, which was repelled, and they say this
may have been it, Like they were trying to get
(08:40):
into Tibet. They were repelled, They got the heck out
of there, and then they perished, like a storm called
them or something, and they died here by this lake.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
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 like a big tree
of soldiers would certainly fit that bill, and then another
kind of soldiers. So when this was discovered by H. K.
Madwall in nineteen forty two, World War two was in
(09:10):
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 a non successful
(09:31):
Japanese invasion of India, which I think is one of
the reasons why they kept it choiet for years.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Okay, well that makes perfect sense, actually sure, because I
wondered about that. 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.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
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 ease. You don't
bear everybody right there where you're living. You kind of
take them away a bit, and maybe that's what that was.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
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 at self sacrifice or as an act
of devotion to one of the Hindu gods. And they're like, well,
maybe Ruken Lake is one of these lesser known spots
for ritual suicide, and that's what happened to all these people.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Yeah, that's a pretty good one.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
What else, there's another one that is 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.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
And everyone was like, oh God, Phil Jesus every time.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Yeah, you get us every time. Phil, you can really
see through the clutter.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
You know what Phil's nickname is, what low hanging fruit Phil?
Speaker 2 (10:56):
That's a great name.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
And then finally, after everyone you know, kicked Phil out
of the office and told him to go get everyone coffee,
they said, feels kind of onto something, but Also, what
if it's not like a cemetery per se, but it
was just people. It's now a cemetary because they were
victims of a landslide or something and that's just where
they are now.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Yeah, that'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 now, 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,
(11:40):
but of all the artifacts they found, that was the
only 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,
(12:00):
that theory held zero water because there had been an
earlier unofficial sighting by a British climber named TG Long
stuff if you can believe that, yeah, he saw them
first in nineteen oh seven as far as Europeans go,
and so they couldn't possibly have been there because of
World War Two.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
That reminds me of the old joke from Rodney Dangerfield
and Back to School, when'd you come over and help
me straighten out my longfellow?
Speaker 2 (12:29):
Yeah? Man, what a great movie.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Yeah, I haven't seen that a long time.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
I saw that in the theaters.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Did you really?
Speaker 2 (12:36):
I totally did.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
I don't know if I would have been allowed to.
Is that rated R? That probably wasn't rated R? Was it?
Speaker 2 (12:43):
I could see it rated R? My mom took me
if I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
No, that's sweet. Yeah, I love it the Triple Lindy,
Thanks mom. Yeah. Oh.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
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 guilt of bandits
in India that may or may not have existed, like Jerry,
but they're like, no, somebody would have dropped their weapons
(13:16):
way more than just one iron spear. Yeah, 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.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
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 there 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
(13:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Yeah, the trader's theory was proposed by the other philm
fact Phil, because anytime he open his mouth, everybody'd take
the fact Phil. Come on, yeah, can we get away
with fact these days?
Speaker 1 (14:11):
I think so things have.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Gotten way more risque. All the kids sing about being
high all the time, that's true.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
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 death definitively. So they did that, they were like, no,
everyone here seemed like they were doing pretty well. No
signs of disease. So that also kind of rules out
(14:39):
the cemetery and burial ground along with the fact that
there were no 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.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
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 that's not definitive. I'm not
one hundred percent certain. But just the fact that these
people their age range was like eighteen to thirty five,
(15:12):
and there weren't any very old people at least found
among the remains, you suggest that it wasn't a cemetery too.
So the idea is like none of these initial theories
panned out. They all got shot down boom boom boop,
one after the other. But we're still left with this
huge question, a cliffhanger question. If you ask me, what
(15:34):
is the reason that these skeletons ended up as many
as eight hundred dead people at this tiny little lake
sixteen five hundred feet more than five thousand meters in
the Indian Himalayans.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
Should we take a break or you just setting me
up for something.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
Let's take a break, all right, we'll be right back, So, Chuck,
(16:19):
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,
(16:42):
the earth opening up and swallowing everybody in a village
might have 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's talking about. Well, it just so happens that there's
a local legend among the people who live around the
(17:02):
Rupcn 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 long standing pilgrimage to honor
(17:26):
Nanda Debi.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Yeah, so this is a pilgrimage that would be undertaken
every dozen years again to honor that god you spoke of,
Nanda Devi who was we should say, in this case
a manifestation as a mountain from the goddess Parvadi, very
big goddess and the Hindu pantheon, and the goddess of
(17:48):
like a good goddess, goddess of like great things, love, marriage, devotion, beauty,
like all the goodness and kind of levy things.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
That's funny. I noticed you left out fertility and children.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Yeah, that's not the goodness. So Pavardi again can embody
a lot of different forms. In this case, it was
a mountain. And so this pilgrimage would take place every
twelve years. And Rupkend is on that route, one of
nineteen stops and the last stop on the way to
the final destination, which is what is it a mountain
(18:23):
called ham Kund.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
Well, it's another glacial lake on the other side of
that really treacherous cliff that's above Rupken.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Okay, So this is the final lake before the penultimate lake,
before the final lake.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Right, And so this pilgrimage like this exists. There's one
coming up in twenty twenty six 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. And
(19:00):
when they get to Rupken, the second last stop, and
they continue on up this very treacherous, scary ridge barefoot
at sixteen thousand feet in elevation, they go down another
thousand feet to hom Kund, 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
(19:21):
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 called the Nanda Devi
raj Yatra. And this local legend says that hundreds of
years ago a king and a queen king yes Sadwal
(19:43):
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 happen to them.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Well, yeah, earlier when I mentioned sounds like a party
with the parasols and the musical instruments 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 Non de Debi was not too fond
of this approach, did not like this atmosphere, and so
(20:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
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 two thousand and four,
I think this was the first actual, like big study
done on what the heck was going on at Rupken Lake.
When they looked into this local lore, they're like, actually,
(20:55):
a lot of the evidence supports this legend. Yeah, So
they started kind of really digging into a little more
and they found that the age range I think I said,
of the people involved were between eighteen and thirty five.
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
(21:18):
a royal entourage. It would account for it. The thing
that really kind of gives that away is there 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
(21:39):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
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 a you know, an assistant,
a local porter, that's like 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
(22:11):
around their forehead. And if you been doing that for
long enough, like they would have been, then they might
have these you know, indentations in the same place. So
everything is sort of lining up here. They also carbon
dated the bones between eight hundred and nine hundred CE,
which would have fit the timeline. So phil is getting
pretty excited at this point.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
That's right. There was another, really there's another piece of
really solid, circumstantial evidence that supported the legend. Remember they
found a bunch of Bengals and the remains of parasols. Well,
even still today, Nanda Devi devotas who follows the Nanda
Devi Rojja Yatra, the pilgrimage, I know it's work. They
(22:53):
travel with brightly adorned parasols, and they wear bengals as
part of their devotion to Nanda Devi. And they again
they found a lot of parasols, a lot of bengals.
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
(23:14):
was struck down on their pilgrimage.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
All right, so you got all this evidence, it all
seems to fit. There was an analysis in two thousand
and four that I think you said that was one
of the first like big studies. And an archaeologist named
Tom Higghem from Oxford University said, Anna, what I think
this is what happened to you guys. It all fits,
And we do like to follow the lead of the
(23:39):
local folklore because that can often yield, you know, clues
or hents to a direction, and we think their directions 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 hailstorms that have killed hundreds of people
and thousands of livestock with dreamely large hail, so we think,
(24:03):
and 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.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
Yeah. The incident you're talking about happened in eighteen eighty
eight killed two hundred and thirty people, and so you
can imagine if these people could run for shelter and
two hundred and thirty 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
(24:33):
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
(24:55):
ridge that leads to home Kund. And then eventually their
bodies were deposited by rock slides down to the lake.
Not one hundred percent clear on that, but it didn't matter.
They felt like they had solved the mystery finally of
what all these skeletons were doing at Rupkend.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
All right, well, let's take our second break here and
we'll come back, because the story's not over, you guys,
and we're going to talk about what happened right after this.
(25:37):
Still all right, So that theory is hanging out there
in two thousand and four, hangs out for about ten 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 twenty fourteen. I guess it was Phil
(26:00):
Maybe we should take another look at these samples. Everybody fruitfill. Yeah,
Like things have come a long way in the ten
years in science, so maybe we could glean something. So
a five year study kicked off in twenty fourteen involving
sixteen labs around the world, and they sampled bones from
thirty eight of those individuals, sent them to all these
(26:21):
labs and got some really really interesting results in that
out of the thirty eight, twenty three belong these are
all different people. Twenty three belonged 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.
(26:44):
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 out of Like,
first of all, why are these people not all the
same people?
Speaker 2 (26:58):
Right?
Speaker 1 (26:59):
Because we can go ahead and throw that theory out
the window, the first theory, because they would have all
been 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.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
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 did not fit? No,
it didn't. And so these results were quite astounding, as
(27:32):
you can imagine. But you said, I think sixteen different
labs were conducting different kinds of tests, and the other
labs tests came in and supported what they had found
about the genetic makeup the ancestry of those groups. One
of the things that they found was that the diets
among the different groups were different, and they actually matched
(27:53):
the ancestry that the genetic testing had revealed. So like
the people from the mediterrane and 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
(28:16):
were like these findings were true. Like this wasn't just
some weird random anomaly.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
Yeah, for sure, but it's it's like the mystery is
just deepened at this point. Yeah, they tried to find
as far as 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
(28:46):
different and exotic, and like maybe it could have been Mediterranean.
They basically struck out on that front. So the mystery
is deeper at this point until we get to our
I guess, greatest reveal when the study revealed that the
(29:06):
skeletons not only were different people from different ancestry, but
within those groups even they came from different eras. Yep.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
So remember I said that, like they were originally trying
to account for a single mass death event that accounted
for all of the dead people that 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
(29:37):
years apart as a matter of fact, so they had
separated them into three groups based on their genetic ancestry.
Rupe and A were the members with South Asian ancestry.
The people who you'd expect to be there Roup can
be were the Mediterranean people. And they looked at their
genetic profile and they get this. They said that the
(29:58):
closest genetic profile around are people who live on Crete,
which is an island south of Greece in the middle
of the Mediterranean. They didn't they said it. 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 Rupken Lake. Right. Yeah, those people died
(30:19):
in the eighteenth century, is the best guess they have
based on the carbon dating. The people from Rupken A
they died between the seventh and the tenth centuries, and
the people in that group didn't even seem to die
at the same time.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
That's right. But the Group A that perished sometime between
the seventh and tenth centuries does support if you go
back to that original local legend of King Yazda Waal
and Queen Balampa play love seeing Queen Bolampam. That's a
good one. It does fit with that timeline. But within
(30:57):
that group, like you said, they seem to have from
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.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Yeah, that doesn't rule out, and all evidence still supports
that some group from rupkend a group could have been
that royal entourage that was part of the local legend.
But because there was one group that died between six
seventy five and seven sixty nine and another group from
rupkind A that died between eight ninety four and nine
(31:30):
eighty five. See, they like they don't know who is who,
Like 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 fact that different
separate mass death events happened at least three times over
(31:50):
the course of one 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
twenty fourteen to twenty nineteen, 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
(32:11):
diet were working from the same bones that the people
had tested what the genetic profile was of 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
(32:33):
you said, previously been thought of as a solved mystery generally.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Yeah, I love the idea of the one Randoh Chinese
person because it's sort of jibs 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
(32:59):
new show Go series?
Speaker 2 (33:01):
No, but didn't it just rack up at the Emmys?
Speaker 1 (33:04):
It did, And I previously I don't know why it
didn't like 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 like just
the aesthetic of it and the story, like it's just
a part of history that I think is super cool.
So I started watching it. I'm like four episodes in
(33:26):
and it's awesome, and you know, the whole notion here
is there's this British guy that ends up in Japan,
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
(33:47):
they discovered some new route with their ship and all
of a sudden they're like, all right, well, I guess
i'd live here now.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Is the British guy played by Matt Damon again? Did
he reprise?
Speaker 1 (34:00):
But that was a different movie. No, nor was it
Richard Chamberlain who.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Okay, so is this also based on James Clavel's Showgun.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Okay, I'll check it out. We should also say that
the lone Han Chinese person made up Group C. They
have their own.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Group, yeah, group of one like Phil.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
Well, there's two pills, but ones liked and the others disliked.
Actually they're both kind of dislike, but one's really disliked.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
Over he's definitely his own group.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
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
Rupken Lake or what went on. And so it leads
to the question like, are we ever going to be
(34:59):
able to solve this? And the answer to that is
there's a good possibility we will because if you think back,
this twenty fourteen to nineteen study was working with the
bone powder from just thirty eight individuals. Yeah, and there's
as many as eight hundred 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
(35:23):
weird data we're going to get back.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
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 trick
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 you know, clearly put
(35:49):
together by the hand of a person much much later.
And so they're they're rearranging things, taking things of them,
like like taking bones and looting artifacts and things like that.
But what happens when you when you rearrange stuff like that,
like a like a numbskull, it takes away the context.
(36:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
Yeah, like over the top, one of them's wearing legal
warmers on his armbone. Yeah, so yeah, without context a second,
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
(36:47):
and start interpreting things correctly is with context, and without context,
their hands are tied largely. But luckily, as we've seen,
there's molecular biology, there's evolutionary 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,
(37:09):
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 two thousand and five 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
(37:31):
of a thousand years, maybe even longer. Yeah, so it's
possible that we wouldn't have had any context anyway, and
it's not just a bunch of jerky mountain climbers who
were messing with the bones in the ten years that
you could hike past Rupkin Lake.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
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 bengals and the
the musical instruments and stuff. And then I think that
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
(38:14):
doesn't seem to me like there's going to be a
single definitive explanation, but a combination of explanations.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
Yeah, totally. I mean, and there's so many ways to
die up there, like not just has sailstones or rock slides,
but also just plain old blizzards. Getting lost in a
blizzard and soccumbing 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 these this pilgrimage that just died
(38:41):
over the years in this one particular spot. It's just
that dangerous. But that still leaves the mystery of what
a group of Mediterraneans, possibly from Cree, we're 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 pilgrimages around the world
(39:02):
and I hadn't heard of it. So how did these
people from the Mediterranean in the eighteenth 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 has frozen
over ten months of the year, a lot of the
(39:23):
bodies or skeletons or remains are preserved at the bottom
of 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 weird stuff it's going to yield.
(39:45):
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 actually historic mysteries.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Yeah, for sure. Another good thing on the hope of
finding something out about this is they did the government
and did shut down that route to hikers and commercial hiking,
So like that's it's not gonna be disturbed by those
knuckleheads anymore.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
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 that rupkend among
the pilgrims themselves, So I would think it's now that
you've done away with the commercial climbers, it's probably fairly
safe now.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
Yeah, I agreed.
Speaker 2 (40:37):
Okay, you got anything else about Rupken 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.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
This is just a very sweet appreciative emails. 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 thirtieth 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
(41:15):
thirty people who have influenced my mindset, and you guys
are on that list. My spouse and I actually only
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, house,
tsunamis work so you wind down the West Coast, and
(41:36):
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 want to say thanks
for contributing to those memories in an indirect way.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
That's awesome.
Speaker 1 (41:52):
One comment I made, and you're about to love this part, Josh,
because get you look pretty good in.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
This new oh Okay.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
Set up to one comment I made in my spouse
during our most recent road trip to BC this summer
was how you to speak to each other the complete
respect and appreciation for each other's personal moments. I can
it for the life and you 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
(42:21):
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,
(42:41):
I cannot imagine how much more compassionate and empathetic you
are in everyday life. Well we maybe more so on
the show. 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 desired to know that what you do carries meaning,
(43:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:20):
And happy happy birthday, and also hello to your spouse,
and we look forward to the next road trip.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
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 this, you can do that.
You can send it via email to stuff Podcasts at
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
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