This undated image courtesy of Dr Emery Smith show a tiny, mummified skeleton discovery in 2003 in Chile’s Atacama Desert, tucked into a leather pouch behind a church. Photo: Agence France-Presse

   



Now scientists in California have extracted DNA from the mummy’s bones and pieced together the real and tragic story of the individual, known as Ata. Rather than a visitor from another world, Ata was a girl who appears to have been stillborn, or to have died immediately after birth, with devastating mutations that shaped her extraordinary body.

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