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Last March, a group of researchers from Stanford University and the University of California at San Francisco "revealed the truth" about the "foreign skeleton" discovered in the middle of the desert. Atacama in Chile in 2003. [19659002] The tiny 15-centimeter-long mummy was found in the La Noria region and its strange silhouette, for which it was labeled "alien", sparked a global debate.
In addition, the skeleton was sold on the black market, taken from the country and was in the hands of a Spanish collector who really believed that he was a stranger
After the first badysis, he was very clear that the skeleton was human and according to US researchers, it was the mummy of a girl with strange genetic malformations, including dwarfism and other growth problems, and who died shortly after childbirth.
However, less than four months after the revelation These findings were refuted by an international team led by the University of Otago in New Zealand.
According to this new explanation, Ata, as the mummy called, had no malformations, was a normal fetus of 15 weeks and "The strange shape of the head can be explained by the conditions of childbirth and burial, "explains ABC.es.
For the group of European researchers, the Americans used a "faulty logic", since you can see a normal development of the skeleton.
"They made several important mistakes in the evaluation of skeletal morphology," said Sian Halcrow, head of the new study in the Spanish media.
For Halcrow, the "genetic variants discovered by the first team the girl did not have any known functional effect on the human skeleton at this stage of fetal development."
She also pointed out that the conical shape the skull should be aa "that a fetus of this age (15 weeks) does not have the same cranial proportions as a term fetus (as indicated in the first survey)" and that the conditions in which he was buried, both by the pressure and the heat exerted on it, he would explain his particular form.
In addition, he criticized the "unethical" treatment that Genome Research magazine had given him, because "it should require a statement of ethics for the publication of human data: that is," he said. Halcrow went further in his criticism and baderted that this is a "clear example of how research that is not rigorous, badytically sound or conducted by properly trained researchers can spread misinformation".
Finally, he points out that once it was proven that the remains were human, they should have been returned to Chile, since "the extraction of the mummy had this been illegal. "and that there is also an ethical dilemma compared to" alive living relatives "of Ata.
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