The Mystery of the Mummies in Old Lady Spider Cave, Ladakh

Send us Fan Mail 📖 Read the companion essay 🎥 YouTube 🎙️Available for Broadcast Thirteen thousand feet up in the Himalayas sits the Old Lady Spider Cave — three rooms descending into darkness, the last one crawlable only on your belly, its floor scattered with human bones. In this episode, we follow a landmark 2026 study (Science Advances, Reich Lab / Harvard) that extracted DNA from ten naturally mummified people who lived there roughly 1,500 years ago. What the genome revealed astonished r...