It's a tiny mummified skeleton about 6 inches long that was wrapped in fabric tied with purple ribbon found buried in a shallow grave near an abandoned Catholic church in 2003 by scavengers digging for valuables in a Chilean desert ghost town called La Noria. (Deserts are where everything strange ends up.) It passed through many hands and ultimately ended up with a Spanish group called the Institute for Exobiological Investigation and Study in Barcelona. It's so strange that many UFO believers insisted that it had to be an alien or an alien-human hybrid. Besides its strange cone-shaped skull, it only has 10 pairs of ribs instead of the normal 12.
Gary Nolan, a Stanford University biologist, studied the photographs and became fascinated. "You can't look at this specimen and not think it's interesting; it's quite dramatic. So I told my friend, 'Look, whatever it is, if it's got DNA, I can do the analysis.' " They managed to get a surprisingly undegraded DNA sample from inside one of the bones and spent five years analyzing it, assembling a whole team in the process. "We started with curiosity, then took it as far as we could."
They assembled bioinformaticists from both Stanford and UCSF and ended up sequencing the specimen's entire genome. (Some of that work was done by Roche, only a short walking distance from my house.) Then they made use of the Human Phenotype Ontology, a database that links abnormalities in human development with genomic data and brought in experts on pediatric bone diseases.
What they discovered in this specimen were mutations not just in one, but in seven genes that govern bone development. They would have been responsible for multiple deformities and malformations. Some of these mutations were new and had never been observed before.
But significantly, the specimen's genome was entirely human, South American, most closely related to the Chilote Indians indigenous to that region.
So what this apparently is, is a late-term female human fetus that was still-born, or a baby girl that died soon after birth. The bones appear to be from an older child, but that may be the result of one of the mutations associated with premature bone aging. It isn't very ancient either, buried in the 20th century. (Apparently with love by somebody, judging by the ribbon and the burial by the church.)
Nolan says: "We now know that it's a child. I think it should be returned to the country of origin and buried according to the customs of the local people."
The paper was published in the March 22, issue of Genome Research.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/...031518.php
Full text of the paper is here:
https://genome.cshlp.org/content/early/2...l.pdf+html
Gary Nolan, a Stanford University biologist, studied the photographs and became fascinated. "You can't look at this specimen and not think it's interesting; it's quite dramatic. So I told my friend, 'Look, whatever it is, if it's got DNA, I can do the analysis.' " They managed to get a surprisingly undegraded DNA sample from inside one of the bones and spent five years analyzing it, assembling a whole team in the process. "We started with curiosity, then took it as far as we could."
They assembled bioinformaticists from both Stanford and UCSF and ended up sequencing the specimen's entire genome. (Some of that work was done by Roche, only a short walking distance from my house.) Then they made use of the Human Phenotype Ontology, a database that links abnormalities in human development with genomic data and brought in experts on pediatric bone diseases.
What they discovered in this specimen were mutations not just in one, but in seven genes that govern bone development. They would have been responsible for multiple deformities and malformations. Some of these mutations were new and had never been observed before.
But significantly, the specimen's genome was entirely human, South American, most closely related to the Chilote Indians indigenous to that region.
So what this apparently is, is a late-term female human fetus that was still-born, or a baby girl that died soon after birth. The bones appear to be from an older child, but that may be the result of one of the mutations associated with premature bone aging. It isn't very ancient either, buried in the 20th century. (Apparently with love by somebody, judging by the ribbon and the burial by the church.)
Nolan says: "We now know that it's a child. I think it should be returned to the country of origin and buried according to the customs of the local people."
The paper was published in the March 22, issue of Genome Research.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/...031518.php
Full text of the paper is here:
https://genome.cshlp.org/content/early/2...l.pdf+html