A creepy mountain lake is filled with hundreds of human skeletons and literally no one can tell you why

Roopkund Lake is filled with hundreds of human skeletons, and no one knows why.

The high-altitude lake, which sits in India's Himalayas, has been an archaeological mystery since the morbid contents were discovered by a forest ranger during World War II. There are several extremely creepy details about the lake, which harbors an estimated 500 bodies in its depths. For one thing, "not a single skeleton found so far is intact," The Atlantic reports. For another, the bodies sometimes float back up to the surface, often with their "flesh still attached," The Independent writes.

And for another, the best working theory for explaining why there is a lake full of human bones in the first place just got completely blown out of the water.

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Until recently, archaeologists had believed that Roopkund Lake was the site of a massive tragedy that took place some 1,000 years ago — perhaps the skeletons belonged to a group of travelers who had gotten caught in a storm and perished. That theory was swiftly disproven in a new study released Tuesday in Nature Communications, which analyzed the DNA of 37 of the skeletons.

It turns out that while the people indeed perished some 1,000 years ago, it didn't happen all at once. It happened sporadically over time, and as recently as the early 1800s. Plus the bodies weren't South Asian, as one might expect at a lake in India; their DNA makeup was more akin to people from the Mediterranean region, some thousands of miles away.

On the one hand, this is pretty cool for geneticists, who study patterns of human migration. On the other hand, a creepy lake filled with dead bodies just got way harder to explain. Read some of the new theories at The Atlantic.