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This Creepy Skeleton Is Actually Human [PHOTOS]

May 3, 2013, 03:07 IST

Garry P. Nolan, Ph.D.What you see here is a real-life lilliputian, the tiny mythical characters from Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels."

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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.

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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.

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