Two decades ago, the rumors began: in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, someone had discovered a tiny mummified alien. But the truth that scientists have discovered, is equally bizarre.

What happened is that an amateur collector exploring a ghost town was said to have come across a white cloth in a leather pouch. Unwrapping it, he found a six-inch-long skeleton. Despite its size, the skeleton was remarkably complete, but there were striking anomalies.

Preserved by the dry desert conditions, the mummified skeleton was undeniably weird. It was only about six inches long, missing a pair of ribs, and it had a highly deformed head and face as compared to usual human proportions.

Ata, as the remains came to be known, ended up in a private collection, but the rumors continued, fueled in part by a U.F.O. documentary in 2013 that featured the skeleton. But now, a team of scientists have presented a very different explanation for Ata — one without aliens, but intriguing in its own way.

They performed a DNA analysis, eventually managing to reconstruct much of Ata’s genome. They found the mummy was not alien but human, belonging to the local population in the locale it was found.

The mummified remains were that of an unnaturally miniature child with never before seen mutations from some kind of  condition the scientists haven’t seen in other humans genetically sequenced so far.

According to the new analysis, Ata was a human girl of Chilean descent, who perhaps died in childbirth even though she exhibited the bone composition of a six-year old child.

The researchers say the genes indicate Ata suffered from a disease causing a series of odd physical mutations seen for the first time. And because of that, was discarded near a church in the Atacama desert.

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