A teensy skeleton with a
squashed alien-like head may have earthly origins, but the remains, found in
the Atacama Desert a decade ago, do make for quite a medical mystery.
Apparently when the
mummified specimen was discovered, some had suggested the possibility it was an
alien that had somehow landed on Earth, though the researchers involved never
suggested this otherworldly origin.
Now, DNA and other tests
suggest the individual was a human and was 6 to 8 years of age when he or she
died. Even so, the remains were just 6 inches (15 centimeters) long.
"While the jury is out
regarding the mutations that cause the deformity, and there is a real
discrepancy in how we account for the apparent age of the bones … every
nucleotide I've been able to look at is human," researcher Garry Nolan,
professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford School of Medicine, told
LiveScience. "I've only scratched the surface in the analysis. But
there is nothing that jumps out so far as to scream 'nonhuman.'"
Analyzing the tiny human
Nolan and his colleagues
analyzed the specimen in the fall of 2012 with high-resolution photography,
X-rays and computed tomography scans, as well as DNA sequencing. The
researchers wanted to find out whether some rare disorder could explain the
anomalous skeleton -- for instance it had just 10 ribs as opposed to 12 in a
healthy human -- the age the organism died, as its size suggested a preterm
fetus, stillborn or a deformed child, and whether it was human or perhaps a
South American nonhuman primate.
The remains also showed
skull deformities and mild underdevelopment of the mid-face and jaw, the
researchers found. The skull also showed signs of turricephaly, or high-head
syndrome, a birth defect in which the top of the skull is cone-shaped.
The genome sequencing suggested the creature was
human, though 9 percent of the genes didn't match up with the reference human
genome; the mismatches may be due to various factors, including degradation,
artifacts from lab preparation of the specimen or insufficient data.
The team also looked at
mitochondrial DNA, or the DNA inside the cells' energy-making structures that
gets passed down from mothers to offspring. The so-called allele frequency of
the mitochondrial DNA suggested the individual came from the Atacama, particularly
from the B2 haplotype group. A haplotype is a long segment of ancestral DNA
that stays the same over several generations and can pinpoint a group who share
a common ancestor way back in time. In this case the B2 haplotype is found on
the west coast of South America.
The data from the
mitochondrial DNA alleles point toward "the mother being an indigenous
woman from the Chilean area of South America," Nolan wrote in an email.
More mystery
The jury is still out on the
mutations that caused the deformities, and the researchers aren't certain how
old the bones are, though they estimate the individual died at least a few
decades ago. In addition, they didn't find any of the mutations commonly
associated with primordial dwarfism or other forms of dwarfism. If there is a
genetic basis for the deformities, it is "not apparent at this level of
resolution and at this stage of the analysis," Nolan wrote in a summary of
his work.
In addition, even if they
found those mutations, they may not explain the anomalies seen in the skeleton.
"There is no known form of dwarfism that accounts for all of the anomalies
seen in this specimen," Dr. Ralph Lachman, professor emeritus, UCLA School
of Medicine, and clinical professor at Stanford University, wrote in a report
to Nolan.
This wouldn't be the first
time alien-looking remains have been brought to the attention of science. The
alienlike skulls of children were discovered in a 1,000-year-old cemetery in
Mexico. Researchers who examined the skulls said they had been deliberately
warped and illustrated a practice of skull deformation that was common at the
time in Central America.
"It's an interesting
medical mystery of an unfortunate human with a series of birth defects that
currently the genetics of which are not obvious," Nolan wrote of the
Atacama skeleton.
The research was featured in film
"Sirius," a crowd-funded documentary that premiered on April 22 in
Hollywood, Calif.
Source: http://news.discovery.com/human/alien-looking-skeleton-poses-medical-mystery-130430.htm
Source: http://news.discovery.com/human/alien-looking-skeleton-poses-medical-mystery-130430.htm
This seems to support the theory that we are descendants of the Ananaki, the people that according to the Sumerian chonicles created them. They live on nibiru a came here to dig for gold that they needed to repair their atmosphere. They were too weak for the job so they created us.
ReplyDeleteThat's what the Sumerians wrote.