An extremely small skeleton, with an alien-like head, was found in the Atacama Desert in Chile, according to NBC News. This caused speculation that an extraterrestrial being had come to planet Earth—although researchers had never suggested the skeleton’s origin.
DNA evidence only moved the alien theory further away from the truth since fidings proved that the tiny skeleton belonged to a human being. Researchers say the skeleton belonged to a person in the age range of six-years old to eight-years old. The skeleton was six inches—or 15 centimeter—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," said Researcher and Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University Garry Nolan in an interview with LiveScience. “I've only scratched the surface in the analysis. But there is nothing that jumps out so far as to scream 'nonhuman.'"
Nolan and his fellow researchers studied the skeleton using high-resolution photography, X-rays and computed tomography scans, in addition to DNA sequencing.
The researchers were looking for why the human was deformed and at which age it died. One of the deformities—besides the obvious six inch height—was the 10 ribs the skeleton possessed. Humans usually possess 12 ribs.
The alien-shaped head may be due to turricephaly, or high-head syndrome, a birth defect which can cause a cone-shaped head.
The researchers found that the skeleton most likely belonged to a human due to the genome sequencing. Nine percent of the creature’s genes did not correlate with the reference human genome. However, the mismatches could have been caused by degradation, artifacts used in lab preparation of the specimen or simply not having enough data.
Researchers are still unsure why the creature was so small. They looked into a possible connection with any type of primordial dwarfism but could not find any mutations in the creature that would suggest dwarfism.
According to Ralph Lachman, a professor emeritus at the UCLA School of Medicine and a clinical professor at Stanford University, even if the short skeleton was explained by dwarfism, there would still be questions about the creature’s appearance.
"There is no known form of dwarfism that accounts for all of the anomalies seen in this specimen," he said.
The research was shown in the film, “Sirius.” “Sirius” was a crowd-funded documentary that was shown in late April in Hollywood, California. A picture of the recovered remains can be seen in the documentary's trailer below.
