The key to cracking the Roopkund bones mystery was getting together a diverse set of disciplines. Professor William Sax is a celebrated anthropologist, and his insights into the links between the collective memory of the locals and the evidence collected would prove invaluable. But he was also building upon some stunning discoveries. At Oxford University's Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, part of its Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, Dr Tom Higham used a state-of-the-art accelerometer mass spectrometer (above, Higham is on the right) to establish the date of the disaster that overtook the Roopkund victims to about 850 AD. The device is accurate to within 30 years, against the 150-year margin of error offered by earlier technologies. And he was also able to establish that the victims all died at the same time. This was no gradual process; it was a catastrophe.
Meanwhile Lalji Singh at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, found that the DNA from the tissue samples taken by the expedition members matched, suggesting the victims were family members. And they showed mutations specific to Maharashtra's Kokanastha Brahmins. In Pune, S.R. Walimbe (below, examining a skull from Roopkund), a palaeopathologist of the department of archaeology, Deccan College, made a series of crucial discoveries. These would not only help eliminate most competing theories of how the victims died but also suggested who they might have been, and even more importantly, how they died so suddenly.
