Short Stuff: Atacama Skeleton

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human I'm John Polk. For years, I was the poster boy of the conversion therapy movement, the ex-gay who married an ex-lesbian and traveled the world telling my story of how I changed my sexuality from gay to straight. You might have heard my story, but you've never heard the real story. John has never been anything but gay, but he really tried hard not to be. Listen to Atonement, the John Polk story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:58Short Stuff is about learning, laughing, and feeling a little less alone. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:11Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here sitting in for Dave. This is Short Stuff, which is off to a bad start already. That's right, and this is the story of the saddest skeleton. It is really sad. There's like five different reasons it's sad, but you can kind of understand a little bit why the skeleton would get so much attention. It's known as the Atacama skeleton, and it was found in the desert of northern Chile, Atacama Desert, in an abandoned town called La Noria back in 2003. That's right. It's little, very small, about six inches in length or 15 centimeters.

1:53And it has a very interesting shape to the skull, very conically shaped. And also has only 10 pairs of ribs, wherein we usually have 12 pairs. And so, of course, right away, there were UFO people saying, it's an alien. It's got to be a tiny little alien. There's no other explanation. Yeah. Look at that thing. Other people said, hey, not so fast. It looks more like a non-human primate, maybe a shapeshifter. We don't know from what weird place this thing came from. But that's just the beginning of the story. I don't want to ruin anything just yet. Yeah, the skeleton also is not fully skeletonized.

2:37Like there's desiccated flesh attached to tissue attached to it in some places too, including the face. And the reason why is because, like I said, it came from the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. That's one of the driest nonpolar places on Earth. And it can mummify human remains pretty easily. It's between the Chilean coastal mountain range and the Andes. And the town of Lenorea, which is situated in the desert, was once a mining town, a nitrate mining town. I think Saltpeter, actually. Yeah, that's right. You love saying Saltpeter. Yeah. Why are you going to say anything else when you can say Saltpeter?

3:17Agreed. It uses a fertilizer a lot. So they abandoned the town in 1930s, I guess, after they had mined up all that stuff. So it's, you know, long way of saying it's a very good place to preserve skeletons there and just naturally. But not only that, but the ancient Chinchoro culture there had a tradition of mummifying bodies on purpose through their embalming process. So an even longer way of saying that finding something out there, it is not unlikely that it would be pretty well preserved. Yeah, and not the least of which because of the solar radiation there. Apparently, it's higher than anywhere on Earth.

4:00Not a lot of water. It's very hot in the day, very cold at night. It's just, it's like just a perfect place to make a mummy. And so in 2003, the world first heard of the Atacama skeleton thanks to a guy named Oscar Munoz, who's a treasure hunter, who said that he went to Lenoria and found just sitting on a shelf in one of the buildings, the Atacama skeleton. And most other people say, oh, we don't think that you just found this thing on a shelf. Yeah, most other people say he really dug this thing up from a burial site. So that's sad thing number one. And no-no number one is you're not just supposed to do that as a treasure hunter.

4:41That's not a treasure. Later on, that skeleton was sold to a guy named Ramon Navia Osorio. He was a Spanish business owner and just a collector of oddities. And also, it just so happens, a president of the Institute for Research and Exobiological Studies, which is a UFO enthusiast organization. Right. And so ufologists have like a fairly smallish community of people who will actually travel to conferences. So it's not a big surprise that Navia Osorio met up with a guy named Stephen M. Greer, who is a very prominent ufologist. I think he must have come up in our Area 51 episode because I recognize his name.

5:29but he is very outspoken about trying to get the U.S. government to disclose all of the information they surely have on aliens, their awareness of aliens, what really crashed in Roswell, all of that stuff. And when Greer found out that Navia Osorio had the Atacama skeleton, he was like, we have to figure out what this thing is. Can I take a tissue sample? That's right. And that feels like a great place for a break. What a cliffhanger. Yeah. We'll be right back.

6:10Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally. And I'm Hari Kondabolu. It's a new year. And on the podcast Health Stuff, we're resetting the way we talk about our health. Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know, and how messy it can all be. I like to sleep in late and sleep early. Is there a chronotype for that or am I just depressed? We talk to experts who share real experiences and insight. You just really need to find where it is that you can have an impact in your own life and just start doing that. We break down the topics you want to know more about. Sleep, stress, mental health, and how the world around us affects our overall health.

6:50We talk about all the ways to keep your body and mind, inside and out, healthy. We human beings, all we want is connection. We just want to connect with each other. Health stuff is about learning, laughing, and feeling a little less alone. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, this is Dr. Jesse Mills, director of the Men's Clinic at UCLA Health and host of the Mailroom Podcast. Each January, guys everywhere make the same resolutions. Get stronger, work harder, fix what's broken. But what if the real work isn't physical at all? To kick off the new year, I sat down with Dr.

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8:19All right, so Stephen Greer has gotten in touch with Noveria Osorio and said, Hey, I got a plan here. Let's get this. Let's extract some DNA, have it examined for this documentary called Sirius, S-I-R-I-U-S. It's inspired out of one of my books. We can figure out what this thing is, like, you know, hopefully full bore and we can know for sure. Yeah. And I guess Sirius got publicized enough that a guy named Gary Nolan, who's a microbiologist, he reached out to Stephen Greer and said, hey, I can help you run a genomic test on this thing for your movie Sirius. Let's do this. And Stephen Greer said, great, I'm sure that was quite unexpected.

9:10Yeah, and another thing that was unexpected was they found that the DNA was, quote, modern, abundant, and high quality, and is human. There's no doubt about it. So, obviously, this was not an alien being. They published this research in March of 2018 in the journal Genome Research. and what they found is, you know, the second and probably most sad thing is that it was probably a little baby girl who died in the womb. Yeah, she was almost certainly stillborn. If she was alive when she was born, she would not have lived very long. And they, like, if you haven't seen the Atacama skeleton, that's probably a good time to go look up a picture of her.

9:54But the reason she has such an unusual appearance is because they attribute it to the really like disproportionate number of genetic mutations she has. You know, just one single genetic mutation can very easily alter a person's appearance. She had multiple genetic mutations and they have no idea why, but they're like, well, this explains basically everything. Yeah. And also seemed like it was, you know, pretty sure that it's a preterm birth. She's very well preserved. So they're pretty sure that she's under 500 years old. And that's what I meant by fairly recent. But they said they don't know.

10:38Like she could have died in the past like 30 or 40 years. And if that's true, then her parents might potentially still be around. And we have this situation where there could be parents. And even if there aren't, we have snatched this skeleton from a tomb of this little girl who died prematurely because of, you know, issues like birth issues. And it's like the saddest thing in the world. And not only that, people around the world are saying like alien. Look at this, obviously an alien. Yeah. It's like, no, these are actually congenital genetic issues, not alien. So, yeah, you put all this stuff together.

11:16You just hope that the family is not aware of this. The thing that stood out to me, though, Chuck, if she died within, say, 40 years, that would put her in the 80s, the 70s. And the town where she was found, allegedly, Lenoria, was abandoned in the 30s. So I'm not sure what she would be doing there. But I did see in a lot of different places, they're like, she could have died quite recently. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was such a sort of outrage after they found this out when that paper was published in 2018 that the Chilean Society of Biological Anthropology and the Chilean Association of Archaeologists both came out and were like, this was a really unethical study.

11:57Shouldn't have done it. It's against the law, first of all, under the Chilean law, it's illegal to carry out archaeological, anthropological or paleontological excavations without getting authorization from the Council of National Monuments, which wasn't done. That's a big one. They're also like, by the way, give us our remains back. That's repatriate her. And then a lot of focus came on to Gary Nolan and his group for even running this test in the first place. And they essentially understood. They're like, you know, you're right. This whole jam is quite unethical. At least in our defense, we did not handle the body.

12:38We've never seen the body in person. We got a one millimeter, a cubic millimeter piece of bone to use as the sample. So at least there's that. And yes, we believe that this baby's remains should be repatriated back to Chile. So I don't know if they got all the heat off of them, but at the very least, they were willing to acknowledge the ethical lapse on their part for sure. Yeah, I think that was a fairly stand-up thing to do. But the body is not back in Chile. It's still in the possession of Ramon Navia Osorio in Spain. Oh, really? Yeah. He's got it still. I don't know that he's making any moves to give it back.

13:19And also I saw Stephen Greer disputes the findings that it was human. Anything else? Just a... That was a scoff if I ever heard one. Yeah. All right. Love you, Chuck. Short stuff's out.

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13:56I'm John Polk. For years, I was the poster boy of the conversion therapy movement, the ex-gay who married an ex-lesbian and traveled the world telling my story of how I changed my sexuality from gay to straight. You might have heard my story, but you've never heard the real story. John has never been anything but gay, but he really tried hard not to be. Listen to Atonement, the John Palk story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.