April Fool Prank ?

[uniface]

I thought so. But the story's dated May 1. (?)

Tiny Alien-Looking Skeleton Poses Medical Mystery
Posted on May 1, 2013 by Soren Dreier

A teensy skeleton with a squashed alienlike head may have earthly origins, but the remains, found in the Atacama Desert a decade ago, do make for quite a medical mystery.

Apparently when the mummified specimen was discovered, some had suggested the possibility it was an alien that had somehow landed on Earth, though the researchers involved never suggested this otherworldly origin.

Now, DNA and other tests suggest the individual was a human and was 6 to 8 years of age when he or she died. Even so, the remains were just 6 inches (15 centimeters) 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,” researcher Garry Nolan, professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford School of Medicine, told 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 colleagues analyzed the specimen in the fall of 2012 with high-resolution photography, X-rays and computed tomography scans, as well as DNA sequencing. The researchers wanted to find out whether some rare disorder could explain the anomalous skeleton — for instance it had just 10 ribs as opposed to 12 in a healthy human — the age the organism died, as its size suggested a preterm fetus, stillborn or a deformed child, and whether it was human or perhaps a South American nonhuman primate.

The remains also showed skull deformities and mild underdevelopment of the mid-face and jaw, the researchers found. The skull also showed signs of turricephaly, or high-head syndrome, a birth defect in which the top of the skull is cone-shaped.

The genome sequencing suggested the creature was human, though 9 percent of the genes didn’t match up with the reference human genome; the mismatches may be due to various factors, including degradation, artifacts from lab preparation of the specimen or insufficient data.

The team also looked at mitochondrial DNA, or the DNA inside the cells’ energy-making structures that gets passed down from mothers to offspring. The so-called allele frequency of the mitochondrial DNA suggested the individual came from the Atacama, particularly from the B2 haplotype group. A haplotype is a long segment of ancestral DNA that stays the same over several generations and can pinpoint a group who share a common ancestor way back in time. In this case the B2 haplotype is found on the west coast of South America.

The data from the mitochondrial DNA alleles point toward “the mother being an indigenous woman from the Chilean area of South America,” Nolan wrote in an email.
More mystery

The jury is still out on the mutations that caused the deformities, and the researchers aren’t certain how old the bones are, though they estimate the individual died at least a few decades ago. In addition, they didn’t find any of the mutations commonly associated with primordial dwarfism or other forms of dwarfism. If there is a genetic basis for the deformities, it is “not apparent at this level of resolution and at this stage of the analysis,” Nolan wrote in a summary of his work.

http://zen-haven.com/alien-looking-skel ... l-mystery/

[shawomet]

No, it's not an April Fool joke. It started taking the ufology world by storm 10 years ago with Dr. Steven Greer the leading proponent that it is the remains of an alien being, but it will likely turn out to be human. Somehow. LOL...

http://www.sirius.neverendinglight.com/

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/04 ... 44661.html

http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/lifest ... ted-human/

The man behind the film is Steven Greer, a medical doctor and leading advocate of UFO disclosure by the American government. Here is his website:

http://www.disclosureproject.org/

And his Wikipedia entry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_M._Greer

I must say the conclusion by the scientists that this "kid"(?) lived to 6-8 sure conjures up a strange image of a strange guy. If he lived that long, he was taken care of and I wonder how his people regarded him?

Hmm...Greer's Disclosure Project website has been closed. It was there this morning. He's still on Facebook...

https://www.facebook.com/Disclosure.Project