What you see here is a real-life lilliputian, the tiny mythical characters from Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels."
This is not a hoax.
The tiny mummified skeleton has been baffling researchers since it was discovered in the Atacama desert region of Chile.
One thing seems pretty sure so far: It's not a monkey, and it's not an alien.
The face you see to the right is totally and completely human. It was born with a birth defect.
The child measures only six inches tall, but researcher Garry Nolan, of Stanford University, says it could have lived to be about six to eight years old at the time of its death. The body has been lovingly given the name "Ata" based on where it was found.
The skeleton's DNA seems pretty normal, and researchers have not identified the mutations that would have caused the deformities, but the answer is still lurking somewhere in the little human's genome.
Nolan has sequenced the mummy's DNA 15 times so far (industry standard is 50 times to get a complete, high quality, genome. Because over time DNA falls apart, a small amount of the genetic code obtained with each read isn't usable).
With only 15 reads, 91% of the genome has been fully sequenced and matched up with human DNA, but Nolan told Business Insider that "the specimen is 99.9999999% human as far as I can tell." It shares DNA with people indigenous to the west coast of South America.
Pediatric radiologist Ralph Lachman, of the UCLA School of Medicine, examined X-rays of the specimen. He thinks the unusually large head may be the result of a condition called turricephaly (also oxycephaly).
See the rest of the story at Business Insider