By Anupum Pant
In the year 2003, in a deserted Chilean town in the Atacama Desert, a bizarre looking skeleton was discovered. It was the size of a palm, about 6 inches in length and didn’t look even anything close to a human being. Instead of the normal 12 pair of ribs a human being has, this mysterious skeleton had just 10. The bones were completely real, it wasn’t a prank. Unless someone had access to really alien technology which could make absolutely real bones using an artificial method, they couldn’t have faked something like this.
Initially rumours of this being the skeleton of a creature from some other planet, or it being a skeleton of an unknown species on earth spread pretty quickly. And then about 10 years later scientists from Stanford university ruled out both the possibilities. They confirmed that it was a human. Also 9% of it DNA did not match the human genome reference – which is huge considering that something as different as an ape has the DNA which matches to the human genome much more than that.
No form of dwarfism nor any genetic defect that could explain this thing could be thought of. Nor could they figure out what exactly had caused such a deformity. In fact, that still remains a mystery.
When tests were done to find the age of this mummy, it was found to be only a few decades old. And the skeletal development indicated that it was of a 6-8 year old child, even though the size of it was no larger than a 22 week old foetus.
More about it [ScienceMag] [Snopes]