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Short Stuff: Atacama Skeleton · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. But I'm Josh
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: and there's Chuck and Jerry, so you're sitting and forget
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: for Dave. This is short stuff, which is off to
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: a bad start already.
• 0:14
  Speaker 2: That's right. And this is the story of the Saddest Skeleton.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: It is really sad. There's like five different reasons it's sad.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: But you can kind of understand a little bit why
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: the skeleton would get so much attention. As known as
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: the Atakama skeleton, and it was found in the desert
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: of northern Chile, Atacama Desert, in an abandoned town called
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: Ladnoria back in two thousand and three.
• 0:40
  Speaker 3: That's right.
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: It's little, very small, about six inches in length or
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: fifteen centimeters, and it has a very interesting shape to
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: the skull, very conically shaped, and also has only ten
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: pairs of ribs where we usually have twelve pairs. And
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: so of course right away there were uf people saying
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: it's an alien. It's got to be a tiny, little alien.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: There's no other explanation.
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, look at that thing. Other people said, hey, not
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: so fast. It looks more like a non human primate,
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: maybe a shape shifter.
• 1:14
  Speaker 3: We don't know.
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: From what weird place this thing came from. But that's
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: just the beginning of the story, that's all. I don't
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: want to ruin anything just yet.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah. The skeleton also is not fully skeletonized, like there's
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: desiccated flesh attached to tissue attached to it in some
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: places too, including the face. And the reason why is because,
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: like I said, it came from the Atacama Desert in
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: northern Chile. That's one of the driest non polar places
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: on Earth, and it can mummify human remains pretty easily.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: It's between the Chilean coastal mountain range and the Andes
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: and the town of Lenora, which is situated in the desert,
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: was once a mining town, a nitrate mining town. I
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: think Saltpeter.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: Actually, yeah, that's right. You love saying Saltpeter.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Why are you gonna say anything else when you
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: can say Saltpeter?
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: Agreed, It's used as a fertilizer a lot. So they
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: abandoned the town in nineteen thirties, I guess, after they
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: had mined up all that stuff. So it's, you know,
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: long way of saying, it's a very good place to
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: preserve skeletons there and just naturally. But not only that,
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: but the ancient Centori culture there had a tradition of
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: mummifying bodies on purpose through their embalming process. So an
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: even longer way of saying that finding something out there,
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: it is not unlikely that it would be pretty well preserved.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and not the least of which because of the
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: solar radiation there. Apparently it's higher than anywhere on Earth,
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: not a lot of water, it's very hot in the day,
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: very cold at night. It's like just a perfect place
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: to make a mummy. And so in two thousand and
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: three the world first heard of the Atikamma skeleton thanks
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: to a guy named Oscar Munos who's a treasure hunter,
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: who said that he went to Lenoria and found just
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: sitting on a shelf in one of the buildings the
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: ati Kama skeleton. And most other people say, oh, we
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: don't think that you just found this thing on a shelf.
• 3:23
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: Most other people say, he really dug this thing up
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: from a burial site. So that's sad thing number one,
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: and no, no number one, as you're not just supposed
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: to do that as a treasure hunter. That's not a treasure.
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: Sure later on that skeleton was sold to a guy
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: named Ramon navia Asorio. He was a Spanish business owner
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: and a just collector of oddities. And also, it just
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: so happens a president of the Institute for Research and
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: Exo Biological Studies, which is a UFO enthusiast organization.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: Right, And so you fologists have like a fairly smallish
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: community of people who will actually travel to conferences. So
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: it's not a big surprise that navia Osorio met up
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: with a guy named Stephen M. Greer, who is a
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: very prominent ufologist. I think he must have come up
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: in our area fifty one episode because I recognize his name.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: But he is very outspoken about trying to get the
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: US government to disclose all of the information they surely
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: have on aliens, their awareness of aliens, what really crashed
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: and roswell, all of that stuff. And when Greer found
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: out that navia Osorio had the Ada Kama skeleton, he
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: was like, we have to figure out what this thing is.
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: Can I take a tissue sample?
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: That's right, and that feels like a great place for
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: a break.
• 4:49
  Speaker 3: What a cliffhanger? Yeah, we'll be right back, all right.
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: So Stephen Greer has gotten in touch with Navaria Assorio
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: and said, hey, I got a plan here. Let's get
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: this Let's extract some DNA, have it examined for this
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: documentary called Sirius S I R I U S. It's
• 5:31
  Speaker 2: inspired out of one of my books. We can figure
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: out what this thing is like, you know, hopefully full
• 5:39
  Speaker 2: bore and we can know for sure.
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And I guess the Serious got publicized enough that
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: a guy named Gary Nolan, who's a microbiologist. He reached
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: out to Stephen Greer and said, hey, I can help
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: you run a genomic test on this thing for your
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: movie Serious. Let's do this, And Stephen Greer said great,
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: let's I'm sure that was quite unexpected.
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, And another thing that was unexpected was they found
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: that the DNA was quote modern, abundant and high quality
• 6:11
  Speaker 2: and is human. There's no doubt about it. So obviously
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: this was not an alien being. They published this research
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: in March of twenty eighteen in the journal Genome Research.
• 6:23
  Speaker 2: And what they found is, you know, the second and
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: probably most sad thing is that it was probably a
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: little baby girl who died in the womb.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, she was almost certainly still born. If she was
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: alive when she was born, she would not have lived
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: very long. And they like, if you haven't seen the
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: autocommon skeleton, that's probably a good time to go look
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: up a picture of her. But the reason she has
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: such an unusual appearance is because they attribute it to
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: the really like disproportionate number of genetic mutation she has.
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: You know, just one single genetic mutation can very easily
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: alter a person's appearance. She had multiple genetic mutations, and
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: they have no idea why, but they're like, well, this
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: explains basically everything.
• 7:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and also it seemed like it was you know,
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure that it's a preterm birth. She's very
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: well preserved, so they're pretty sure that she's under five
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: hundred years old, and that's what I meant by fairly recent.
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: But they said they don't know, like she could have
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: died in the past, like thirty or forty years And
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: if that's true, then her parents might potentially still be around.
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: And we have this situation where there could be parents,
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: an even if there aren't, we have snatched this skeleton
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: from a tomb of this little girl who died prematurely
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: because of you know, issues like birth issues, and it's
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: like the saddest thing in the world.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: And not only that, people around the world are saying,
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: like alien, look at this, obviously an alien. Yeah, it's like, no,
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: these are actually congenital genetic issues, not alien. So yeah,
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: you put all this stuff together. You just hope that
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: the family is not aware of this. The thing that
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: stood out to me though, Chuck, is she died within
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: say forty years. That would put her in the eighties
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: the seventies, and the town where she was found, allegedly Lenoria,
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: was abandoned in the thirties, so I'm not sure what
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: she would be doing there, but I did see in
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: a lot of different places they're like, she could have
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: died quite recently.
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: Right, Yeah. Well, it was such a sort of outrage
• 8:38
  Speaker 2: after they found this out when that paper was published
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: in twenty eighteen that Chilean Society of Biological Anthropology and
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: the Chilean Association of Archaeologists both came out and were like,
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: this was a really unethical study. Shouldn't have done it.
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: It's against the law.
• 8:53
  Speaker 3: First of all.
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: Under the Chilean law, it's illegal to carry out archaeological,
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: anthropological or paleen to logical excavations without getting authorization from
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: the Council of National Monuments, which wasn't done.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: That's a big one. They're also like, by the way,
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: give us our remains back, let's repatriator. And then a
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: lot of focus came on to Gary Nolan and his
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: group for even running this test in the first place,
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: and they they essentially understood. They're like, you know, you're right, this, this,
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: this whole jam is quite unethical. At least in our defense,
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: we did not handle the body. We've never seen the
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: body in person. We got a one millimeter a cubic
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: millimeter piece of bone to use as the sample, so
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: at least there's that. And yes, we believe that that
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: this baby's remain should be repatriated back to Chile. So
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: I don't, I don't. I don't know if they got
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: all the heat off of them, but at the very
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: least they were willing to acknowledge the ethical lapse on
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: their part for sure.
• 9:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that was a fairly stand up th
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: to do.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: But the body is not back in Chile. It's still
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: in the possession of Ramon Navia Osorio in Spain. Yeah,
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: he's got it still. I don't know that he's making
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: any moves to give it back. And also I saw
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: Stephen Greer disputes the findings that it was human anything else,
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: just a that was a scoff if I've ever heard one. Yeah,
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: all right, love you. Chuck Short stuffs out.
• 10:34
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