Discovery of Atacama skeleton

The Atacama skeleton, nicknamed Ata, is a tiny mummified body about fifteen centimetres long found in 2003 in an abandoned nitrate mining town called La Noria in Chile's Atacama Desert. Its small size, elongated skull and unusual ribs led to claims in popular media and in a 2013 documentary that it was an alien or other non-human being. In 2018 geneticists at Stanford University sequenced its DNA and showed that it was human, the remains of a female foetus or newborn baby with several mutations that cause severe bone-growth disorders. The case raised ethical questions about the removal of the remains and their sale on the antiquities market.

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