Science Journalism? Skeleton Lake in India.

In a recent article in The Atlantic, Rachel Gutman apparently misstated the conclusion of a genetic study of human remains from Lake Roopkund in Uttarakhand, India. She wrote that "the skeletons’ genetic makeup is more typical of Mediterranean heritage than South Asian", but the abstract of the article in Nature Communications says that they sequenced DNA from 38 individuals, of which a group of 23 individuals fell within the range of variation for modern south Asians, whereas, in contrast, another group of 14 have ancestry typical of the eastern Mediterranean. The final individual exhibited southeast Asian ancestry.  The different genetic groups corresponded to different chronological groupings. The south Asian bones dated from ~800 CE, while the others were much later, ca. ~1800 CE. Thus, saying that the skeletons are typical of the Mediterranean is so imprecise as to be significantly misleading. Otherwise, it was an interesting article, just as the original research article is.

Perhaps I should add that, as an archaeologist who works in Florida (at least from time to time), the idea of burying people in a lake does not seem mysterious or implausible because in the Archaic period we have examples here of lake bottom cemeteries, such as at the famous Windover Pond site.